I’ve never kissed a soul.
I have only kissed the small head of cat, all dusted with hay. And too, I kissed raindrops off of the apples, cold in autumn.
I’ve known books, high on shelves. I met a wave when it knocked me over, and a model carousel. I once dug up a mollusk. I know how it spilled out its shell, milk-white—I know I threw it back to sea.
I know my father. I know him singing in the morning. I met a man at a gas station, who helped me, and then refused to meet my eye. I’ve known a river running over rocks, and a tree too old to know me—who I could never climb—but my brother could—my brother—I know he climbed too high.
I knew a building, often hollow, and a brick there in the rubble; an abandoned store, with a little light inside, probably squatters; a man, down on his luck, leaning on a light post, said, “Bless you,” for no reason other than, he wanted to, I suppose. A glass bluebird, an old friend of mine, sits on the windowsill—frost crawls up the pane, but she is in repose.
My mother once pulled a rabbit from a mouth. I know how he died in the middle of night—the terror we could not quiet. I know the way music rises—and vibrates—when you make it with a band; in concert, the force of all the horns together rattles a drum. I know a button dropped in a parking lot. I found it and shouted, so excited by its ivory that my coworkers, just as weary, burst into raucous laughing. I know a horde of clovers, four-leaved, I scoured out in heat.
They are pressed between pages of Kafka; I know what he believed.
A woman, behind a counter at noon, ringing up my coffee—once asked about my coat. I told her that same old story; how a classmate saw me in the cold. And the woman said her mother left coats behind when she died. She had given them away last night.
I know oregano and rosehip—and a man who carries thyme, and spends hours catching the sky. My sister claims she isn’t as brave as I; I know I see her in the wind, always looking back to flash a grin.
And I know the storm, and rows of corn, and a herd of cows, and their many obsidian eyes. A shepherd dog, in the woods, he trailed at my side. He wouldn’t leave me behind.
A horse in a pasture, braying, “Love may be the brightest kind of pain.”
Hannah Rowell (she/her) is a graduate of Bowling Green State University. She majored in creative writing. Fate located her in Ohio against her will, though she’s uncertain where she would rather be. She would prefer that you envision her as being a palm-sized gastropod who writes about loneliness and unconditional love. Her work will be found in Mythulu, In Parentheses, and Pumpernickel House.
