by Sarah Ghoshal
When the bottle of frozen vodka crashed onto the tile floor, we all knew it was over. After all, the sheets in the wind stopped blowing long ago, the hurting backbones and tired ankles and fallen dreams burn tightly with sleet.
The outside is a burst of fog.
The outside is a pockmarked hill.
The outside is the woman I always thought I would be knocking just loudly enough for me to wonder if I’ll ever sit with her knee to knee and compare c-sections and fear.
When you get older, you question everything, but some things are so constant you forget they are there.
We leave our feet in the water long enough
to not feel the water anymore.
We numb ourselves with snow and plight.
We harm ourselves with invisible knives.
We wander, we follow, we march with the confidence of children.
And I wonder if all of it was worth it, to fog up our own dreams, to enter the oblivion, to think the Matrix might be real, the tile floor might be soft, the future might be dead on the beach,
so heavy that we can’t find our breath in the cold.
Sarah Ghoshal‘s poetry has been published in Cream City Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Moon Magazine, among many others. She is an associate poetry editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection and has a scholarly article forthcoming in an anthology published by McFarland. She lives, writes, and teaches in New Jersey.