Temporary Hold & Desert Clothes
Temporary Hold
On Sunday I lost vision in my right
eye. It became my second eye,
singular. I’d only ever had eyes. Now
the first was given pride of place in
my skull and it was doing double
time. The surface of the sky no longer
looked real. Depth was an invention
of the second eye. The Counsel of the
Second Eye worked in a brutalist
statehouse managing my expectation
of the 3D, the politics of the cubed
and spherical, cooking up plots on
graphs, all two dimensional. My
forward facing eyes had slid into the
prey’s sideways glance. I became
jealous of fish. I begrudged evolution,
and gelatin. The rooms got larger, the
stone buildings with their iron bones
and hours upon hours of thirty minute
lunch-breaks. Canyons. I saw: the
axle of hours, the secret counting
water does with the moon. The
world— never finished. When it
returned, my double sight, I watched
the men in their jackets file out of the
Department of the Second Eye, their
blocky, rough cut shirts with the pink
slip poking out.
Desert Clothes
I wore the memory of grass. I wore the temple’s altar glass. I wore a shining
called serious business. All the world could see I was ready. I siphoned the
dead water out and spit it first. Drowned birds in the cisterns after rain,
floating. Purifying it — water turned to the slow drip of time. The sun
touched me all day into the night, the flies landed on my lips, tried to kiss my
spit from me. Wind drove out all thought and when I moved it was as if to
see a very special occasion— the birth of my first daughter, or a dog’s
funeral. I wore my best hat. Remember. Remember the sun. It went with me
beyond the shores at night, into dreams. Sleeping, my hands lay side by side
burning.
Norah Brady is a moon enthusiast from Boston, MA living abroad in Germany. Her poetry and short fiction can be found in COUNTERCLOCK, Kissing Dynamite, Dishsoap Quarterly, and Blue Marble Review, among others.