Mary Lanham
Mary Lanham is a queer writer, editor, and collage artist based in Minnesota. She is originally from the South; her accent is still around if you know where to look. Mary also hosts The Inspirited Word podcast, exploring ways for anxious writers to turn the creative doom spiral back into a labyrinth path of discovery and connection. Her online home is inspiritedword.com.
Remission
If fear has a smell, it’s the sharp emptiness
of winter, more sensation than odor,
the tender and hidden parts of you suddenly aware
of their constant communion with the air,
the tiniest, maudlin agony of your heart-warm,
running snot crystalizing in your nostrils.
I still won’t walk on frozen water,
not pond or lake or river,
not even after fifteen years in a place
where winter is so robustly inevitable
it leaves its familial fingerprints all over
the ripest summer evening.
Maybe the metaphor is just too obvious to risk,
that constant creaking waiting for the crack,
the drop, the plunging shock
at having been right all along,
this flow of calamity was under there all along,
and knowing so didn’t save you from drowning.
For what’s ice, if not a reminder
that where we stand is only real
under fleeting circumstances,
some specific but unquantifiable structure
of temperature and coincidence?
What is fear but impatience for the fall?
Once I prayed not to die in winter,
to survive long enough to smell something green.
And yet, and still:
an agonizing tenderness,
to feel my hidden self raked and rearranged
by the world, to see my breath blow
into frozen freefall—
now, if only for this moment,
something to be known and touched.
