Embedded Files
The Run
The Run
I The Psychiatric Facility
The trees that line the gravel path are old, planted
at random: a patch of pines propping a row
of ambulances; a shambling oak, arms stretched
around a wire-fenced field; strange willows, waiting
for the wind, in frayed, white casings. Unhemmed
nettles soften the edges of the walk to the hard,
red-tack unit, weather-pressed bracken tight
like the quick of a nail. Dense, hickory overhang
now and then brooks pin-sharp sunlight to spear
loose stones. On the horizon, tall electrical pylons
stand braced like cowboys with six arms, ready
to draw. Instead of guns their hands grip cables
stretched long as highways, guiding them over
fields and away.
II Joan
She twists the earphones cord around her fingers, grips her phone.
She promised herself she would run for an hour. Joan squints
at the sky. It teeters a wide, valiant blue but the air feels sprung
with rain. The sun is unusually high for seven o’clock in the
evening this late in September. The leaves creak back and forth,
barely attached to whipped bark. She leans against her car, pulls
her knee sideways in a stretch. The trees seem faintly courteous
as she walks a warm-up, back straight, stiff as she stops to touch
her toes, then stands to hoik her shoulders back. As a teenager,
she pinched a disc in her spine, dragging a wardrobe up four flights
of stairs. She had believed life could be bent by force of will.
If you pushed hard enough, you could push anything. In time,
it became tiring to convince others of invisible forces, possibilities
littering the day like balls of elastic, one stray kick and they bound
away in jagged, unpredictable lines. Invisible forces like the
unbidden pang for the stranger in a cafe when you stand to leave:
we have faced this space together.
III The Butterfly
She takes off, and her red Nikes scuff the uneven path
as she side-steps potholes, side-swipes bushes and steps in potholes,
she recalls the little boy she saw in the park yesterday, on her way home.
He had stood with small feet jammed apart like a pylon in small Chuck
Taylors, arms rigid above his head, fists clenched with sudden
excitement, overjoyed at the serendipitous crossover of his favourite
insect and his favourite colour: Blue! Butterfly! Blue! Butterfly!
IV the horses
in the paddock
set in the grounds
on the outer rim
of the institute
always felt surprising
fixed behind
its barbed-wire fence
the pale grass
was matted and soft
it was strewn
with windfall apples
with the good side down
white mould
on black leaves
the very existence
of the horses
is unsettling
as though their long necks
are at special risk
of being broken
should patients
in the criminal care unit
break out
there are five horses
in tied-on jackets
scattered
around the paddock
they turn to watch her
with flicking tails
towards the back
a thick brown mare
with a low bend
to her spine
paces restlessly
her whinny fades
then expands
to a squeal
before erupting
in an anxious splutter
she charges at a row
of scarred fence posts
in the cooling air
a faded old grey
is frozen mid-chew
still as a rock
V The Grain Store
At the back of the red tower she dodges loose bricks
at the edge of the stream, fallen from window
frames, crumbling some silent morning, thudding
unseen onto the thin deer trail, into the shallow
water.
The broken, mossy bricks dam the trickle
running beneath carcasses of blackened bracken.
They trap leaves, twigs and anything light enough
to float.
Joan floats over dints and dings, ducks
overhanging gorse, coconut blossoms, sharded brass
in the blotchy forest light. The brambles snatch
her short, blonde hair. They snag her shoulder. Her
nerves send pain to the brain, tattle-tales of blood
blooming beneath her cotton t-shirt.
You see!
You’re alive as these trees. You’re real as nature,
as solid as stones. You’re part of things.
VI Carol
Going back to June,
they were picking blackberries in the lane
behind her house,
there was Carol with her stoop,
grinding her jaw and stopped,
staring at the ground. Her loot
sat in a basket at her feet and the sun slipped
behind a cloud
as she tented her long, stained
fingers to ask Joan,
Will you marry me.
What.
I love you.
You don’t.
I love you!
You can’t even look at me.
I love you.
Don’t.
Joan laughed.
She batted at a fly
and stood in silence
like a flicked-off light bulb,
sodium blaze sucked
into the tangled, white filament,
to a dark glow.
The vertical trees cast a queer,
slant shade across the faded grass.
Pale willows stretched out
of the warm earth as though circling,
quivering in the blue light.
Joan dropped her berries and turned
to walk to the car. Carol sat
on the ground with her head in her hands.
VII The Forest
The trail appears on her right, layered with chipped bark. It winds behind a long-abandoned treatment ward. Through a gap
between thin, dry pines, she spies the over-large, cracked windows of the ground floor corridor. She stops. Oxygen masks hang off a gurney, stopped
at an angle like it had rolled to a halt moments before. The wonky wheels wondered where their patient was. The sign on the wall
above the waterproof blue mattress read: WARNING. The red writing beneath is too small to read. She feels a tug in her chest
wall; the panic anticipation of heart failure, general anxiety. Her CBT therapist had told her to pick up a stone and carry it for the length of time she let herself think
about Carol. Focus on her panic triggers for a time, then let them go. Joan bent down under a Redwood, too big and noble for this place. She scooped
a shard of grey flint. It made a small slice in her thumb as she pinched it tightly, enough to feel solid in her grip. Do you feel guilt
at Carol’s death? As if it could have been Joan’s fault. As if it could have been anyone’s fault. It had taken her a while to reply. She told him they had met here
in the adolescent mental health unit. They had spent three years together with a no belts rule. The music in her headphones
changed. Joan ran. Country songs made the everyday spectacular, and celluloid. That’s one hell-raisin’ town way up in South-Eastern Kansas. Got a
biker bar next to a lingerie store. She had pinched her ear and replied: I feel no guilt. He had nodded, tapped his front tooth with his pen. Joan tripped
out of the forest then stopped, and turned around. She threw the stone hard into the trees, and waited for the clunk on bark. There was none.
VIII The Tangled Man
There are two cars in the parking lot, psychiatrists working
late.
She runs twice around the red brick building, then pauses to jog
on the spot
beside an old metal bin strapped to a lamppost. Behind the
reinforced glass door
the receptionist gives a thumbs-up to someone out of view. A
crow throws
a stiff ruck from the middle of the exercise lawn. Joan runs for
the tarmac hill
leading to the exit down by the train station. She squints at a
man
on the empty platform with no arms in his blurry, white shirt.
He is wearing
a straightjacket, and holding himself like he might unravel. Tug
in her chest.
Heart attack. She picks up a stone, then forces herself to keep
running.
The light dips. The breeze halts. The sun is swallowed by
sudden cloud
vanishing heavy light lines that lanced the trees moments before.
The crow barks.
She runs past clumps of dock leaves, a rickety birdhouse, loose
wire fencing,
a solar-powered Hope Path, wide pecks of dirt, untrimmed
swathes of grass,
black windows, huddled ragweed, yellow trees and in the distance,
the sound of a train.
IX America
She wishes she could cover the future
with the thick, ridged plastic of a library book,
stamped and official.
She would have liked to have grown up in America,
with its amber heat and reddish sun.
The crisp white baseball uniforms, boiled peanut stadiums,
the bodily, warm yellow dust bases.
The rattle of the pitcher’s fast ball as it dies
on the wire fencing.
She has the sense the country could, if it chose, enfold pain completely
in its breezy bays and twilight pines.
In its wide, golden canyons.
In its black bears and security bins.
In its haunted cabins on the lakes.
In its tall women with malt milkshakes.
In its peanut-flavoured everything.
In its lack of basic common sense.
In its two tanned fingers to grammar.
In the suburbs’ neat, narrow paths to everyone’s front door.
In its brushed cotton t-shirts and soft Levi jeans, novelty signage
and people with fringes, people colour-saturated and well-wrapped.
In its wholehearted embrace of Halloween, pumpkin torches, zombie brains
in the freezer, candy buckets and blood juice on porches.
X Flowing, and Flown
She sprints hard,
running in a straight line,
unable to run harder. Her rhythm stalls,
her feet slap
painfully. She is aware of the heat
in her face, the jostling skin
above her jawline.
If the man tries to lunge
with a knife,
she can counter with momentum,
knock him backwards.
That’s one hell-raisin’ town way up in South-Eastern Kansas.
Or she can arc around him.
Got a biker bar next to a lingerie store.
The man’s arms appear,
dovetailed in a tangle.
As she runs towards the exit,
he raises his hand.
He is bald and clean-shaven. His jeans
are too long. His pockets are stuffed
with pages. He is wearing an oversized
white sweater. He moves his shoulder
towards his ear, tilting his head to meet
it. His heels seemed stacked
from the back. He is taller.
He looks at her. He drops his hands
to his sides. He smiles,
pale arms pressed down tight,
pressed straight down.
And then she has passed him.
Joan slows to a stop and turns around.
She pulls her earphones out
and curls forward, hands on her hips.
The train clatters over a pink-rust rail joint
and behind the clouds light bursts to get out
bursts to get out bursts to get out.
Dawn Watson is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University, Belfast, writing a prose poem novel and researching prose poetics. She completed a Masters in Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre in 2018, after winning the Ruth West Poetry Scholarship. Her debut poetry pamphlet is forthcoming with The Emma Press in 2019. She was selected as a 2018 Poetry Ireland Introductions Series poet, and won the 2018 Doolin Writers’ Poetry Award. Her writing has been published in journals including The Manchester Review, The Stinging Fly, The Moth and The Tangerine.
Copyright © 2018 by Dawn Watson, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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