Back to Issue Twenty-Nine.

I was the girl who jumped first

BY ERIN RODONI

into the sanest danger, from ledges a sensible

length above the creek, tide just high enough

to cover the mundane wreckage

of small town reckless—Chevies and shopping

carts, corpse-cows fat with fermented clover—

down deep where currents creep, quick

and colder. There, sunk in the silt: the girl,

the ghost, the gift, my country spooked

me with. Two towns over, she vanished

from her bed or was rumored rotten

in man-tall grass by moon-licked

railroad tracks. The prologue always

the same: she wandered, she strayed

from. Yes, fear twice removed

is fear. I grew into the girl who never stayed

past curfew. I always drove myself

so I’d never have to owe, or beg

my way. I accelerated out of every turn

in my mother’s roll-prone Jeep. Protected

by a physics I barely grasped, I circled

risk beneath those fog-dulled stars.

I never took a goddamn thing too far.

Time Capsule: The Uneven Field

BY ERIN RODONI

Yes, I went to the field like a virgin to the mouth of a volcano, meaning I was in love with my ornaments: the jeweled tug at my lobes, the gold squeeze at my throat. Each pulse, the secret hollow behind each ear, swooned with sandalwood and slumber. Grasshoppers slammed themselves against my bare midriff. Yes, I came to gather eyes like moths. I came despite. I knew the common root of sacrifice and sacrament. It was a rite of passage, to be named for the part the beckoned best. Yes, I went to the field like a bride drunk on dowry, all that worth, all that sparkle in his stare. Yes, I wanted to be watched, thus christened. Yes, there are men who promise sunlight in the wrong season, glow enough to grow a girl right up, and other girls return, shining like the moon, meaning on the other side of that romanticized light, there is a dark treeline where anything could hide. Husk of daylight heavening the sky. Fragrance of wild vines coiling barbed wire, blossoming small white stars named Jasmine, Honeysuckle. Hush: the field was a body of water. I learned to float by holding still. The field was a mirror that returned my body to me through his eyes. No, the field was a body of water, and I kept sinking through my own reflection. The slightest scramble between sacred and scared. Aware suddenly of the cold in my cut-offs and crop-top. Sheer, the drop. No, I didn’t fall for him. If I burned, it was for beauty. That plummet through the many-storied night.