Wither Towards Me
I wish I had more stillness in me.
Wake ripples out, twisting into whale tails, now ribbons; becoming bumpies. A ribbon showing only its darkest parts, pulled by current into a stretched out oblivion. I wait. It approaches, how does it pull? An echo multiplied and spreading flat—still hits the shore. The clouds are marching on to conquer the rest of the sky by storm—they drag, pulled by string, bumping over mountains. Fireflies replace gnats on the cows at night. The swallows—gulping air—tweeter loops in the sky. Black mountains protrude from the ocean of fog like the sharp black rocks of Northern shores. The splashing fog is stuck mid-current. My stomach feels lower, like a hollowed-out pit all dark inside, filling with cobwebs. Her legs are so dry they look like spider webs have been tattooed in white ink on her ankles. I want to lick them. I am teaching a little boy how to poop on the ground. As I do it, I myself poop, accidentally, and I take the poop in my hands and put it beneath the boy among his little poop pebbles, so he won’t know that I’m pooping too. I think this dream is a result of my ongoing constipation. I decided to draw what it feels like to have to pee…and it’s just a vagina. Sliding smooth as if lubed, springs slip in and out of pipes—makes my clit itch. Some days I notice my nose more than other days. Has it always been so shiny and big? She played me a sort of shitty melody and laughed and said, “I bet this is your favorite part.” Then she started undoing the top string and winding it around her wrist. Her posture was bent as she leaned out of the puppet stand. She started sewing the strings back through the others, making some sort of analogy that justified rule breaking.
What’s the word for when you can’t breathe?
I was looking right through my eyelids,
my pulse marked off the seconds of time.
The air shocked with color.
A thoughtless, red mind
came loose like old men coughing.
As nearly as I could tell
I’d wandered into some sort of dream:
A general grayness was giving birth to various shapes.
I knew every raindrop by its name;
you’d think the sky didn’t have any air in it
and the earth was made of paper.
Rather than moving, I was just getting smaller and smaller.
She was about forty, with a bloodless, waterlogged beauty—
fanatically religious utterances seemed to quiver
on her lips. They tasted cheap.
Yet I kissed her fully, my mouth on her
open mouth. And we met inside.
Helen Ruby Hill studies literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She splits her time between North Carolina and Northern California, where her family lives.
