Bad Survivalist: Katie Willingham
What we eat in my dreams
is always the forbidden: bread and more bread, a failure
of imagination. We are not calling it the long emergency,
but we are not not calling it that. Is this like the first silence
that fell between Adam and Eve?: what needed
to be named, what shook
with meaning but held still between them—
knife wrapped in a towel, ghost in the soapdish
waiting to lick the salt from our palms. God,
how amazing and useless to shower in summer,
the word no one comes up with for when you stay
long after you’re clean.
I gargle with salt, worry a chewed inner cheek with my tongue.
How did I get here, having done all I’ve done to myself?
Monday “It’s all happening,” I whisper to the succulent as I water it, knowing this is always true, that I could say it and mean it whenever, but right now I am thinking about indoor plants and where they imagine the water comes from. Do they know about domesticity? Do they know I have a will different from the sky? That I can be blamed for things. I feel it now, what happens next. This is when I tell you that a third of Americans may not be able to afford clean water in 2020, a year that is taking shape all the time, and starting to get claws. This is also a Monday, a new story breaking out into the work week: a letter signed by 15,000 scientists about hurtling toward destruction like they haven’t noticed we already know and we have stopped in the road, in our deer suits. No one much talks of agency in suspension—when you are trying not to happen to anything, how much effort it takes to remain. Katie Willingham is the author of Unlikely Designs (University of Chicago Press). Her poems can also be found in Iowa Review, Diagram, Poem-A-Day, Kenyon Review, Grist, and others. She is the poetry editor for Michigan Quarterly Review. You can spot her in person most of the time in the wilds of Brooklyn, New York, and online always in her virtual home at katiewillingham.com. Image: GeoffS, morguefile.com Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
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