Heather Fowler
Sequestered Second Sister
after Carolyn Forche's "Sequestered Writing"
Birds flew free the day before the accident and after. Small and dark missionaries
at flight through cold wind, arriving on branches the way flight fills the mind with flight,
or November with amnesia, or memory with dark masses. Dark. Masses. Given a day’s
mass, yesterday’s mass disappears with sirens. Then low mimicries of torrential snow
in everything, the way static absorbs emotions half-uttered, like particles of thought
coddled in air then dropped, like they were not morning aches. What ghost comes towards
my bedside now, whispering, “Me”?
―No self specified, yours or mine, for we are both without each other now,
You, first sister I would have loved, dead in infancy, the one who stole one strand
of father’s future with your passing, hid it in cubbies marked regret, nothing anyone
would know about him now, unless apples held stories such that each bite brought back
other states, red things, things that might be and would not. Now, we learn again, oh
sister, this false waking walk through hell, and sometimes I marvel at how people die
so suddenly like you. Come here.
Your ghost is welcome. The armoire knows, as do these chairs, that things must be
stood near, indulged, lived with like mourning fetes, endless summaries of what might
once have been. I must have loved you somewhere deeply, though you were a squalling
child met just once. Why else toss you to my now with language that is secret metaphor
for tears without witness, for open world robberies of one life from another. We have
a new sister now. Do you pause in her linens, sniff her growing hair? Lives, like days,
multiply; it has been years since we
got the call to testify my very first psychic moment, when in San Diego, living in fugue,
I told mother, “Let’s call dad today. I need to.” And then the phone rang with news of your
accident, demise, icy roads, stepmothers killed, fathers injured, you a bird in the ochre wind,
a spirit or lark let leave: Let us hope I'll never be so psychic again, for I would rather walk
through life unclear of premonitions, fail to learn or know its poor outcomes when your baby
bones rattle in my ears this morning like leaves, and you are still at my bedside, twenty years
later, whispering, “Me.” ... I'd ask, “Who are you now?” were I
stronger, but the stale wind will not set free its secrets, the sky will not depict
your face or the color of your locks, just as my days will not bring you rushing real through
April’s door. You would have been a college girl now. How you age me. How time flies! I
was a girl when you died, yet now I see you still reside in static, a commemorative vision of
a windswept ghost whose face is absent, an idea of a thing gone now or ever present,
my last great love that snowy Washington morning when the universe rang black my mouth,
which rang black my tongue, which blacked my eyes, that might have been.
Heather Fowler is the author of the story collections Suspended Heart (Aqueous Books, 2010), People With Holes (Pink Narcissus Press, July 2012) and This Time, While We’re Awake (Aqueous Books, forthcoming Spring 2013). She received her M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University. Her work has been published online and in print in the US, England, Australia, and India, and appeared in such venues as PANK, Night Train, storyglossia, Surreal South, JMWW, Prick of the Spindle, Short Story America, and others, as well as having been nominated for both the storySouth Million Writers Award and Sundress Publications Best of the Net. Her poetry and fiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is Poetry Editor at Corium Magazine and a Fiction Editor for the international refereed journal, Journal of Post-Colonial Cultures & Societies. Please visit her website at www.heatherfowlerwrites.com
Return to January 2013 Edition
after Carolyn Forche's "Sequestered Writing"
Birds flew free the day before the accident and after. Small and dark missionaries
at flight through cold wind, arriving on branches the way flight fills the mind with flight,
or November with amnesia, or memory with dark masses. Dark. Masses. Given a day’s
mass, yesterday’s mass disappears with sirens. Then low mimicries of torrential snow
in everything, the way static absorbs emotions half-uttered, like particles of thought
coddled in air then dropped, like they were not morning aches. What ghost comes towards
my bedside now, whispering, “Me”?
―No self specified, yours or mine, for we are both without each other now,
You, first sister I would have loved, dead in infancy, the one who stole one strand
of father’s future with your passing, hid it in cubbies marked regret, nothing anyone
would know about him now, unless apples held stories such that each bite brought back
other states, red things, things that might be and would not. Now, we learn again, oh
sister, this false waking walk through hell, and sometimes I marvel at how people die
so suddenly like you. Come here.
Your ghost is welcome. The armoire knows, as do these chairs, that things must be
stood near, indulged, lived with like mourning fetes, endless summaries of what might
once have been. I must have loved you somewhere deeply, though you were a squalling
child met just once. Why else toss you to my now with language that is secret metaphor
for tears without witness, for open world robberies of one life from another. We have
a new sister now. Do you pause in her linens, sniff her growing hair? Lives, like days,
multiply; it has been years since we
got the call to testify my very first psychic moment, when in San Diego, living in fugue,
I told mother, “Let’s call dad today. I need to.” And then the phone rang with news of your
accident, demise, icy roads, stepmothers killed, fathers injured, you a bird in the ochre wind,
a spirit or lark let leave: Let us hope I'll never be so psychic again, for I would rather walk
through life unclear of premonitions, fail to learn or know its poor outcomes when your baby
bones rattle in my ears this morning like leaves, and you are still at my bedside, twenty years
later, whispering, “Me.” ... I'd ask, “Who are you now?” were I
stronger, but the stale wind will not set free its secrets, the sky will not depict
your face or the color of your locks, just as my days will not bring you rushing real through
April’s door. You would have been a college girl now. How you age me. How time flies! I
was a girl when you died, yet now I see you still reside in static, a commemorative vision of
a windswept ghost whose face is absent, an idea of a thing gone now or ever present,
my last great love that snowy Washington morning when the universe rang black my mouth,
which rang black my tongue, which blacked my eyes, that might have been.
Heather Fowler is the author of the story collections Suspended Heart (Aqueous Books, 2010), People With Holes (Pink Narcissus Press, July 2012) and This Time, While We’re Awake (Aqueous Books, forthcoming Spring 2013). She received her M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University. Her work has been published online and in print in the US, England, Australia, and India, and appeared in such venues as PANK, Night Train, storyglossia, Surreal South, JMWW, Prick of the Spindle, Short Story America, and others, as well as having been nominated for both the storySouth Million Writers Award and Sundress Publications Best of the Net. Her poetry and fiction have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is Poetry Editor at Corium Magazine and a Fiction Editor for the international refereed journal, Journal of Post-Colonial Cultures & Societies. Please visit her website at www.heatherfowlerwrites.com
Return to January 2013 Edition