Missing You
Mickler’s Landing
Put it on record that the Holy Spirit speaks primarily through gravity. The birds know this; I forget when my body stifles its own existence.
Walking the East Coast, the breakers linger at my ankles, yearning to pull me into their earthly order. Beyond their touch, a berm of a billion shells piled like reverie dust.
God surveys behind a cracked firmament of violet. I wonder how I’ve become alone in so few steps. I see a woman combing for shark fangs, a clumsy terrier chasing a ball in quick bounds.
A sailboat shines like Soria Moria at the scene’s edge. God, why are you out there? Here, where grief and earth fill my ears, I hear the ocean’s proverb: Frail men trust we will never forget the sand.
When I stand again, there’s the muddy surge, shoreline stretching to the arctic, if I could see so far. The rain comes quick. Sandpipers flee as I approach. God is painting something arcane up above.
Retracing the miles I’ve walked, I search for shells and think of their lives before they washed up. I lift my head to the downpour. The star returns. I could be joy or suicide, grains stuck to my skin, but no one’s around to say.
Normal
I stay up grading and piecing together lesson plans from my scraps, thinking of the pizza and spicy deli chicken my mom brought home back then. I know now they were not a treat, but a necessity of exhaustion. Takeout boxes pile higher than dishes. And I see how she continues the great performance of her life, now from my own editing room. Years of filling in her gaps have left me still too foolish for the average day.
She says there’s no such thing as normal, and if there was, it sure as hell isn’t whatever we are. Maybe we’re all discovering fossil footprints in dried mud we danced drunk in the night before. We have no more than prayers like steam meandering upward until it’s gone. I hope God sees when I’m sleepless and weeping a morning away, like today, for a woman who doesn’t fall as desperately, battling demons in better costumes.
Another day passes lying on the couch with depression resting on my chest, unable to lunge, even for the remote, to turn this whole thing off. I hope God sees my words condensing on his window in small, steamy breaths, and makes a picture of them with his fingers. Please, lift up the sun with the slightest motion of your great tattooed hands, and bring, inevitably, at the very least, some mercy.
Connor Watkins-Xu holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland and a BA from Baylor University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, North American Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, MAYDAY, storySouth, The Lincoln Review, Rust & Moth, and elsewhere. His manuscript was named a semifinalist for the 2023 Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize. Originally from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, he currently lives in Seattle. He’d love to hear from you @connorwatkinsxu on Instagram.