elsewhere

by Annie Williams

One of these days the theater burns down, but not today. 

Let me rephrase: I want the flat sound of this place, 

its murky groan. I carve shadows from streets. I stutter 

through the wall between me & that life. Once I learned 

transgression I could never stay warm. Forgiveness 

an indent released. In the humid relief of memory, 

the tape unsticks. Rusty old waterpark on the edge of the frame. 

The laundromat rain-warped. Baseball field crowded with snow.

Houses swimming in light, wire-crossed, lethargic. 

No hills here to act as jaws, land corn-rough and bruised. 

Forgiveness shoved in an unmarked envelope. I bare 

my sins. I bear this name, the one we share. One of these days 

the swamp, blackened, will swallow us whole. 

Imagine everything made wild again: massacre turned jubilee. 

The lake’s tide lush & unmapped. Brackish unmanageable shapes. 

This wound open for business. Carcassed. Too much sinew, 

chewed tough. Wildflowers writhing on the plane. 

Let me rephrase: the ten at night swell, panic-laden.

When the phone call arrived and the glass shattered —

I’ll admit it, I went bone dry, muzzled, my teeth the only thing 

still unmarred. Confession delivered right to my doorstep. 

I saw the wishbone split but managed to coax out the unshed years.

Afterwards, passenger seat always plaited with your timbre, 

never any static on the short drive over, no ash to swallow.

For now: the mangled mornings, havoc a compulsion,

the dream blistering beneath this starving sky. 

We stretch out enough for our limbs to hit the asphalt, run until 

the ache creeps further behind our spines. The only lie I ever told 

was that I could ever really escape.

Annie Williams is a writer and photographer based in the Midwest. In her free time, she enjoys street photography, attempting to listen to every album ever released, and playing Geoguessr.