Lucy woke suddenly with a vision of the scorch burning toward them.
She looked at her daughter’s face — the wax and wane of shadow on her cheek. She watched her daughter’s eyelids ripple over dreams. She remembered her own breath and reined it in to her chest, tamed it in her lungs. The moon was a forgotten face in the sky. It had once been walked over and a man had stuck a flag into its surface. Lucy remembered the moon and felt the flag as an ache. It was like a thorn in her daughter’s cheek. She laid her head back down and shut her eyes. She moved the tamed breath through her lungs, through her blood. She floated to the moon and landed. Knees to ground, Lucy dug the flag from its hold.
As our plastic blue tarp disintegrated over us, Lucy sat on a crate.
She shimmered in the effervescent heat, so that we could not firm up her edges. We went to her mirage, hoping for a story of our future. We told her, The tower dwellers stand frozen in their sky windows. We see them up there in their simple rock forms — they have not turned to gold as they had promised each other, but Lucy’s lips were melded shut and a tremor rippled from her chest. We scanned the land around us, but saw no refuge. We thought, We could climb the stairs to the skyscraper tops, but why? What would greet us there except for insufferable heat, the stone people? We could look down from those high windows, but what would we see except for our lower sky in tatters.
The whale grazed its belly over the land.
Lucy drove through a sparsely inhabited development, surrounded by razed land and flattened hills and the tough plants that propagate in minimalism. She looked up and noticed the whale. The whale was large and gray and moving slowly, and her belly was made of the kind of moisture that never forms into rain. That hovers, expectant, above the horizon. Lucy was driving to work, like she did day after day, and this was the first time she had noticed the whale. She stopped at a stop sign where there was never any one else stopped. She sat there for a while looking at the whale who moved so sadly and close to the ground. She left her car, climbed up rungs of air into the whale’s belly.
We came through the forest back to Lucy’s house.
The deep night opened like a black hole around her home. We knocked on a door painted with pastel blossoms. In her kitchen, Lucy sat us at a table that expanded or contracted, depending on the number of guests. The walls dripped with the vapor of so many pots simmering for so many years. Our tea gurgled a story on her stove. She gave us cups of the earthy brew with leaves floating. The tea flowed through us, darkened our pale blood. The leaves were boats adrift in our veins. We looked out through a window suddenly cleared of condensation. We saw the hollow glints of gone stars. We saw what the wind was hiding. What our world was filtering through.
•••
Kim Parko is the author of The Grotesque Child (co-winner 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Press Book Prize) and Cure All (Caketrain Press, 2010). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in jubilat, Denver Quarterly, Diagram, Caketrain, the PoetryNow podcast, Boston Review (2018 annual poetry contest winner), and elsewhere. Kim lives in Santa Fe, NM, where she creates in the nested and nesting spheres of mother, partner, maker, and hedge witch. She is an associate professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts.