The Grip of It

by Jac Jemc

Behind the house, where the birches are dense like teeth in a mouth, I find a spot where the foliage grows weak.

We play chicken. We wait for the other to give in and listen.

All of a sudden it feels as if we’re halfway down a dark alley with a stranger who seemed friendly enough back at the street.

and I feel the scratch of his beard on my neck like Velcro holding us together.

Answers can be right there in your ears, unheard.

I want to tell that man that the smoke will never fill him up. Nothing will. The yellowing it leaves behind will get closer and darker.

James and I are living in a Latin mass, memorizing ritual, reciting mysteries we’ve given up on deciphering, foreign syllables unrolling in order.

For a moment, I let myself consider what it must be like for an old man to hear his own front door slam and not know who or what has caused it. What role were we playing? The ghosts or the haunted?

The nights like this start to line up like matchsticks, close together, hard to count.

The warm morning has smeared itself on me, has shivered through my jacket until my skin feels spat on under all my layers and the sound is unbearable, like the sound in the house, a rough drone’s strata smoothed and compressed like sedimentary rock, and I feel something move through me that amounts to mere nausea and I lean over to vomit at the place where the wall of the cave transforms into the floor, where vertical changes to horizontal, but the man doesn’t move toward me. He is uninterested in my weakness.

We’re so certain of our fear that we don’t think in those binaries anymore: inside outside, good evil, known unknown, fact fiction.

How it can be hard to imagine yourself a hero with all of your faults laid plain.

How language can sometimes only be heard in its consequences. How it can’t stop being heard after that.

physics being an interpretation of the world and not an explanation.