Sammie Downing
Welcome
I wish I could tell you, come in. But, you see, I haven’t cleaned up in a while. My grandmother taught me to dust and yet bits of myself surround. I wish I could say there are others on my shelves, run your fingers along spines and discover what another being left behind, a carbon trail to track.
In the porch light and falling dusk, surrounded by the itching call of cicadas—summer a glove too tight against my sweaty palms, I can’t rid myself of time and yet I don’t ever want to feel it—I wish I could say: welcome to my house. I built it myself. I learned to spread gravel grout with a flattened finger. that at night, before the walls went up, I sang in the living room and let my voice ring out. And yet, this is not true—there was never a house that exists of our own making. Yes I did build it but no, this is not the truth
Someone somewhere must have said you’re never only here. Stand at the window and recognize all the homes in which you are living. in centuries past, this room felt the quiver of buffalo breath as they bathed in beds of mud. a millennia away and I’d be staring at the sea, flesh on fire as Iguanodons marched through sand into night and back out again. Even before, this house of ours was underwater. stand inside and ears pop, throats close. ghost layers of time piled on top of me while I slept until I drowned without the ability to explain exactly why I couldn’t breathe
I believed recitation lay in lips of cardboard cities I constructed. in prairies and swamps—among live oaks and winter ravenous rain—they fit neatly into the backseat of the car or the awning of an alley. It was in these fortresses that I said “come in, all are welcome here. I don’t care what it is your soul consents to so long as I am very, very far away.” but when someone answered my invitation, entered me, I discovered hollow. I grew deaf from my own echo until numbly I never heard myself just the wind bellow in a paper structure. our city rotted from rain, flattened to the gutter and yet I was on my hands and knees. desperate to crawl back in. don’t.make.me.go.home. this emptiness belongs to me.
If you come inside you won’t see this. Perhaps you’ll see the deer pelt and you won’t know what it means. I might never find words to tell you. You might see the books, how could you not? I want you to know this house fell on me and now my legs are broken. I built it and yet that’s not couldn’t possibly ever be true.
Do you know how desperately I wish I could say, enter. here. even the imagined touch of your hand sends shutters slamming. stricken against any rain. But I burn to go to the window throw out my hands let my palms grow wet
- Sammie Downing
Without Light
When I was little and my dad found his way home: mange-ridden dog fur clumps dangling from scabby skin—I stuck notes in his wallet. Often there was nothing else—no I.D. not even a penny. Our secret—a small piece of paper left to be discovered when he, inevitably, died. Frozen on an alley staircase, bones hissing as they lifted him onto the stretcher: if found, please call 303.733.1758. people loved me here.
It grew so terrible. My fear of the phone.
Crawl into a cave. make claws of your hands. What is it you would write without light? All around us we are left with the leavings of those destroyed. They say Neanderthals did not survive because of the brutality of their loneliness. And yet, all alone, swimming in the embryonic caverns of an earth more obviously seizing. compelled to carve abstractions into dolomite. 24,000 years ago, a time so distant it enfolds me to infinity, a race driven to sea and left to die alone. not even the light of moon over ocean and yet here is the stone and here is the hand in the dark. There is no one left to see me and yet, you see, here I live. Who is it that can say they did not leave us art?
I’ve taken to writing notes in my books. Dear Aliens. If you find this in the heat rash and devastation we’ve left in our wake. believe me. despite all evidence. we were good. please forgive us. people loved us here.
- Sammie Downing
The Age of Fish
I.
you’ve made a fish of me
the moment before you suffocate there is
the ecstasy of body against earth. rise.
breathe fish die fish
I don’t want to be the only one
to hold the hook in my lips
suck its metal blood
don’t watch.
put your mouth to mine.
breathe your breath through me.
balloon this silver body.
your palms on my thorny gills
don’t let the heat of you escape
lock onto this thin, gaping mouth
don’t fear these teeth
keep breathing so when I breathe it’s your breath and where
does one air end and the other begin
it’s only air
we’ve lost ownership. it’s singular, this thing
keeping us alive
I will be the first fish to teach myself undrowning
rising swimming air fish.
when I am with you, I wonder how I could possibly have
forgotten why I learned to fight this hard.
fish ripped from water, whipping boneless against mud
stop fish.
breathe, die, does it matter?
you’re somewhere new
you couldn’t have gotten here alone.
II.
how can the want of the body be the same as the want of the heart?
how can the animal of my need for your teeth, your palm
cupping me patient
desire to be split down the middle and deboned, slick and silver—
belong to the cerebral?
since when does the mind hold more worth than the body?
III.
what would it mean to say I sit at my desk and imagine your tongue
run through me
curled, sea hair across my thigh
and it is not sex that I’m imagining
it is a fish split open
light slipping out
and you:
lapping up this deluge
that is not good not bad, just is.
- Sammie Downing