Letter To E
Katie Fuller
I’m positive neither of us dreamt we’d be writing in such incredible circumstances. And to think even just a month ago—even at the end of a world—desire—dreams.
I think we will come to communicate in fragments. Fragments as necessity.
I read we are just a drop in the ocean, yet on the other end of New Pandemia, I long for a walk with my father in an old-growth forest neither of us will have seen before—another version of heaven.
Sometimes I wonder if heaven is the simplest way humans make sense of radical transformation. When a thing ceases to be what it was, it ascends, we say.
But if you want heaven, look down. Look at the world teeming with life at your feet. Could ascension start with a downward path? What if the world gets tipped right over and the path to heaven is sideways?
*
I pay so much attention to the animals now. I walk around and count the cats as tiny deities.
A motley ensemble of squirrels and robins play each morning through the window. One crow drinks from the puddle left behind by the rain.
At night I dream the banks of the Androscoggin back home are rising. A room made fully of glass, myself inside, with children. A stone cliff to climb like a path of least resistance. A path of least suffering. Least of all— all of it.
*
My heart aches for the quietness of night. The neighbors decide to put their Valentine’s decorations back up. I put a record on and let the needle fall.
I wish for my sister all the PPE she’ll need to survive in her hospital. I still have faith in imagining.
In the bath, lilacs floating— quartz-like, holograms. Me, singing, at the top of my lungs.
Description as a semblance of control in dreams where none exists. I think they call them poems.
A place I am awake, and thankfully so,
The song alone, keeps going.
Reading recommendation? The Waves by Virginia Woolf
“Recommended to me by Cheryl Hindrichs for getting through all that’s going on — considered her best by many — feels like Woolf is talking directly to you, there’s hope, and oh the imagery! No better time to take this ride.
Katie Fuller is a poet from Maine. She is the author of two chapbooks, The Greenwood Cemetery (dancing girl press 2017), and Valve (DoubleCross Press 2016). She teaches writing at Boise State University and has taught for Writers in the Schools at The Cabin.