Honorable Mention, E.E. Cummings Prize, selected by Carolyn Oliver
Before mid-morning slides to early afternoon
I have to speak of the sun on my skin, how I bared it and lay
on a plastic mat in the sand, listening to talk of oil extracted
from under the earth’s tectonic plates. We’ve been sucking it up
from its cushioning wells, he said, and it’s this that will lead
to our end. I thought – what does it matter, all of the damage
we’ve done – the earth will be good to get rid of us. Once we’re gone,
the wells will replenish themselves. Later that day riding home, the highway
wind nearly knocked me off the scooter. Hot air blasted my face so hard
it began to lose feeling. I thought – how good it is to feel at all, given
last week’s ruminations on walking into the ocean, car tumbling off
the bridge to the black surf below. All that was lost – this is what makes it
come back: the brief exchange with recklessness, my body pressing
against the wind to see which of us is more stubborn. Relativity posits
that gravity’s not a force of its own but a consequence of imbalance;
one more trick of the awful rowing toward stasis. Once this is understood,
it’s easy enough to correct: take the weight of the loss and cast it against
what’s left. The sun will continue to burn my skin from millions of miles away.
I’m the fool at the edge of the Anthropocene, laying here, offering it up.
Maggie Cleveland
Maggie Cleveland lives in Providence, RI. Her poems have been included in numerous journals and anthologies. ATOM FISH, a chapbook, was published by One Time Press in 2012. A full-length collection of poetry titled A COMPLICATED PIECE OF MACHINERY WITH NUMEROUS POSSIBILITIES FOR INJURY is forthcoming from Cobalt Press.