I remember this place. I open where the spine surrenders
and find the bookmark of peeled nails as though it has
been minutes instead of years. On the ceramic tiles
are tick marks tallying all the hairs on my head, x’s
plotted to map each oscillation in the valley of breath.
In the mirrors and glass and chrome, I look back
at myself without looking in and cannot look away.
I remember this rigid covenant with the body, this pact
that I would not take more than my narrow share of air
or give myself to the wind as it alters the dune or to
a storm as it bends the trees in a tango of ozone
and leaves letting go. I would flatten like a paper doll
and make my way in a dimension where nothing
unpredictable happened, where each day was a straight line.
If I held a breath, I knew nothing would happen that I couldn’t
control until the lungs betrayed me and sucked in disarray.
I knew how to move between A and B, and that hell was
the trip back from B to A. The map I open now, unfold after
unfold, is too huge for the tiny world it details; I know
it can never be refolded to its tidy square, but only balled
or burned or fled. I busy myself with folding, nonetheless.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 28, Issue 2.
Melanie McCabe is the author of four books of poems, most recently, All The Signs Were There, which won the Longleaf Press Poetry Prize. Her debut novel, Road Longer Than Memory, will be out from Oceanview Publishing in June of 2026. Her memoir, His Other Life: Searching For My Father, His First Wife, and Tennessee Williams, won the 2016 University of New Orleans Press Prize.
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