Written a Few Miles Above a Hole in the Earth We Like to Pretend Isn’t There

Marcus Whalbring

I look away too. Or accidentally think about a moon, 

since when nothing is happening, a moon is happening. 

I feel the sea forgetting me again, 

my hands first, then the color of my eyes, 

though they’re the color of the sea. 

I draw pictures of jungles with no trees in them 

so at least the paper feels more ashamed of itself than I do. 

A name for that kind of hypocrisy happens, I’m sure, 

in the books I tell people I’ve read. 

I don’t have time to read them. 

I sometimes can’t remember names. Of events, of people, places. 

I just call them Justin, from the Latin Justus, meaning righteous. 

My friend I’d walk to school with, for example, 

who lived next door until sixth grade, 

whose parents I never saw speak to each other. 

We stuffed pillows under our shirts 

and “Sumo-wrestled” in his yard while his little sister 

made a real family with her Barbies on the porch. 

I heard he jumped into a river one January night, his 23rd birthday, 

and was found the next morning, 

a quiet smile frozen to his face.

In middle school, my parents separated. 

Dad moved to Tennessee and met a diner waitress 

who smoked Salem Lights at breakfast with her coffee 

while she stared silently at me eating my Corn Flakes. 

Her eyes, the color of a dead tree, said how in-the-way she found me 

until she looked away. 

I looked away too. 

Mom and I vacationed near the sea that summer. Just us. 

We walked together every night in the surf 

and felt it forgetting us more every time a wave broke near our ankles. 

But we laughed like the sea. 

It felt like we hadn’t laughed before. 

I grew up with that laughter aching to crash again 

sky-shaped from the edge of some void inside me that’s never had a name. 

My wife feels that void sometimes when I look away suddenly. 

She fears the Earth grows more sick by the minute, 

forgetting each of us, our names, the lives we’ve had in it. 

She can’t sleep. I rub her back. I lie. Tell her I’m not afraid. 

I tell her, Don’t worry, Justin, 

we will be fine as long as we take care of us. Just us. 

And usually she falls asleep, lies warm against me like a sea, 

so quiet I can close my eyes 

and stare back into the dark that never fails to remember me.