Mystical Dialogue by Sonja Dimovska
-April 28th
The one I liked best
was the house with the tree
that had been peeled
like a banana
by that tornado,
standing, just barely,
among the missing roofs
and caved-in walls.
Oh for shame, and poor things
had been my only sounds
for five miles,
but this tree,
it made me almost giddy.
Others, too, drove for miles to see
what used to be that town.
What a sight, what a sight,
we said.
Eventually, natural disaster
wasn’t enough for us.
We started listening
to traffic reports
to find the accidents;
the alluring taste of metal
at guardrail collisions
and jackknifes and t-bones,
the luck of a bridge collapse,
that taste at the tip
of our tongues.
How alive we were
when someone died,
undone.
-Saturday the 14th
The day after my grandfather died,
we almost died too.
I remember only this:
lights    peeking   through   trees
in the night,
the sleeping sobs of my brother
my sister
my mother,
my hands on the wheel,
my eyes closing
as the lights grow brighter
and brighter
and brighter
like eyes           widening.
Wrong way car.
I jerk the wheel just in the nick.
Everyone wakes, gasps,
cries anew.
We felt so alive, almost dying.
-Today
I pulled over in a rest stop
to write you this poem,
to tell you how I was
rubbering along
in my little bubble of steel
and plastic, when it came
at me,
bound straight into the center
yellow line and froze there,
lowering its eyes
straight and sharp
into my middle.
I slammed my foot
on the brake, but it locked up
and I slid,
pinned dead to my seat
as I watched the distance
between it and me
slide together,
felt the eyes of it
rip me loose from myself,
and I billowed like a sheet
against the windows,
while above me
a tight, gray circle of grackles
exploded over the sky
like streaks of ash after a firework.
Now I know I’ll never
be able to walk again.
I just can’t keep myself
from falling open
onto the sidewalk.
~ Iris Mahan
Iris Mahan is a graduate student at Adelphi University and the editor of their online journal, ‘Tu Duende’. She was the runner-up for 2013 Donald Everett Axinn Award in poetry, and is the author of the chapbook ‘Bathe Once Before and Twice After’, available online. She is currently at work on the translations of the German poet Rose Ausländer.
