sticky soggy swarm
july 23
i hold the damp of july in my hand
a heavy thing
it pools in my palm like beebe
with belly-up fish and foolishness
i’ve been thinking a lot about bodies of water this month. how the mississippi cuts jagged through the country and how now I live on the other side of it. how the crow river squiggles through my hometown and floods my grandparents’ backyard each spring, clinging marks on the trunks of dogwoods to boast how far it can creep into people’s lives. how in february amy and i traveled east to lake michigan and stared out at the horizon until our fingers froze and the incoming planes turned their lights on.
the month sagged with rainfall. we watched the water run in ribbons down the front windows of my workplace as puddles snuck into the back room. we then leaped around in fake anger, secretly excited there was something to do. on the way home buses sped through waterlogged streets in thinly veiled joy. my grandma called to tell me minnesota needed rain desperately and i told her chicago must have stolen it all.
july was bloated with the rain and other things. the honesty of time is suffocating. i’m constantly measuring anniversaries, eager for the numbers to grow and for the distance to mean peace but so far that hasn’t been true.
it’s sinister how a ghost appeared exactly six years since i last saw them. it left me reeling and waiting on grace’s front steps, jumping at every shot off firework. i don’t think it was an intentional visit but it shook me in a way that i later found embarrassing, even though i know people understand. my body remembers so much about hiding in my closet undetected and listening for the sound of the garage door before rushing upstairs.
then here are the good things: elise came to chicago and was unexpectedly able to come see us at the only place i ever go to on a friday night. i received a gift that changed my life and have yet to fully grasp what it means for my future. i cried during barbie and thought about being a young girl and thanked greta gerwig for her continuing service to daughterhood. i’m trying to get back into writing because i took a break in december and didn’t truly get back on the horse until now.
the mississippi starts off tiny. i remember looking at pictures in my sixth-grade state history class and being confused by its humble beginnings up in itasca. it curls, finger-like, through my home state, sweeping up rocks and sticks and people and carrying them southeast and past me. the crow is a baby worm appendage off of it. i read once that in the 60s my hometown experienced major flooding from the baby worm, leaving several houses soggy and rotting and full of dead fish and many more farm fields too sodden for crops. one of the bridges was hit with so many escaping ice chunks that it heaved and was carried downstream. locals followed the pieces of wood and metal all the way down through the next town over. it apparently took almost a year to remove all the debris that flooded into town. the historical society interviewed people decades later and they all seemed unbothered by the flooding somehow. i guess it floods all the time. the river touches my mother’s house and my grandmother’s. it will never touch mine.
i love it peyton