Living / Drowning

The last June I live in Oregon, I drive the tractor-roads every night,

trying to drown / restlessness with dark-choked farms and lavender fields

until town-edge night folds away from the Walmart, a neon monolith

stubbing out the moon with cement-handed light. One night, two AM or later,

you call and say, I’m so sick / of farmland. In the stillborn-morning dark,

you climb into my passenger seat and we drive until the road-end Pacific

and a grey beach of smooth, round stones, each a perfect palm-weight.

You hold smoke in your hands, in your hair, and breathe into the wind,

chest a box of bees relearning honey but still buzzing anger. As day settles

soft and new-born across the water, we pass fears back and forth. We share

being buried alive, graveyard bells and a mouthful of dirt, but while needles

make me sick, you can watch them go under your skin and force yourself unfeeling,

pretend your body belongs / to somebody else until the pain is over.

Pain tastes to me like bleach, false-floral, an air-conditioner cranked too high,

but when you’re afraid, you taste chlorine and rubber, breathing tubes

and lungs pumped empty, from the time as a child you nearly drowned

in a swimming pool and your mother, standing at the edge of the tile,

the back of her head made strange and distant with deep-end distortion,

didn’t notice / until your breath ended. It takes centuries for water

to etch earth into a river-veined canyon, but in that pool, a few minutes

were enough for water to carve a home through throat and dying air,

or drowning to become / eternal inside your chest. 

Emily L. Pate is a writer, avid traveler, and collector/over-sharer of bizarre facts. Born and raised in California, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her poetry and travel writing have appeared in Funicular Magazine, Willawaw Journal, The Northwest Passage, and Blending Magazine. She can be found at emilylpate.com.