April 1, 2024robertfredekenter

Fragments of Autumn at Glacier Lake – Jenny Wong

Fragments of Autumn at Glacier Lake

MOTHS   have tucked their wings, leaving children behind to weather the winter in dormancy.
The sign says it’s too late for boats. Still, I wish I could hold a paddle, let my arms define a
rhythm for this longing. Overhead, a seagull hovers, searching for a flock, searching for others
who’ve landed so far away from where they began.

CARCASS   Birds windward. Bodies backlit by sunlight. The color of their beaks is obscured,
but I know from the way they circle and dip how red-dripped their scissor tips must be. How
long does it take for them to excavate a body? To snip out sinew? Find the bones? How much
can they remove until the skin no longer remembers what it once held and becomes another
scrap, another layer on the earth where it fell.

COCHLEA    The lake could claim me if she wanted. But there is not enough salt in my body to
turn her into sea. Waves and undercurrents murmur in my ear, trickle inwards towards a spiral
nautilus space. Small oceans wash up inside hollow shells. I wonder if the lake can still recall
vast and open and brine. Before glaciers made a hollow for her body and fed her with their
freshwater melt.

WATER CYCLE   Fingertip to surface. The lake and I trace back to where we began, reverse
the map that lined itself on our bodies, and follow it back to the heart. Before icebergs,
downpours, and floods. Before ancestors crashed on this shore. We find something that exists
even now and will last after I am just another fossil underground and the lake dries into an ashen
bowl — water will always abandon the ocean, be drawn to sky, tempted by sun, become drifting
cirrus or thunderous nimbus. There was never a need to be envious of anything so simple as
wings.

PRECIPITATION   Snowflakes loosen themselves from sky,
                                                  drift
                                                            down
to still-warm ground. And so they transform,
                           lose the edges of their crystal,
                                                       change the sound of their fall.
                    No longer ice and whisper. A lake’s gaze is marred
                        by the slap of a raindrop’s fall.
                                            Soon, pounding syllables.
                                         Distance felt.
I see my parents in the creases spreading around my eyes. Waiting for me to say something.
                  Between us, a space            a shape of something lost.
                                       A forgotten word for moth.
          And somewhere inside.
                    Oceans.

JENNY WONG is a writer, traveler, and occasional business analyst. Her favorite places to wander are Tokyo alleys, Singapore hawker centers, and Parisian cemeteries. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions and longlisted for Wigleaf’s Top 50. She resides in Canada near the Rocky Mountains. Twitter: @jenwithwords. Website: http://opencorners.ca/about.

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