don’t want to need
to know
how bad bad feels
to know
to hold on
to good tighter.
I do hate the feeling of
holding
on
tight blood
barely knows my knuckles
in the West and I don’t want to know
that what you need
from me is silence
when I’m remembering a poem
in the Nebraska Sand Hills
about the Nebraska Sand Hills.
but I didn’t know I’d need to know
this vision,
just velveteen
landscape
of golden grass
rumpled like some
celestial fabric
to lie exactly
as it fell
shimmering, and would I have understood
had I not been practicing
seeing that crackling beauty
in the dryness
of California?
I’d held my spyglass to the Prairie
and now the little dogs
with their little folded hands
pop out of their dens to watch
the only car on the road
flying
shining
reflecting glimmer
and all the holding tight
and circular days
& pitching tents
by lantern light
have traded us this new dream
of tucking our arms to our chests and rolling
like granular marbles and in my dreams the grass doesn’t itch
at all it feels like a shag carpet feels when you’re
stoned in someone’s parents’ house
if the carpet were dipping into clouds
just as the evening turned orange
and I remember how sturdy my bones were
as a kid and how my dad would take us
up to campus
and I would roll down those neon hills all thunkthunkthunk
spinning like a free carnival ride
and I want to return and try
the same thing here
and when I memorized
that Twyla Hansen poem
in high school I was
thinking about stars
where I thought that all
the magic was but now
I have a birthday card
on my bedside table
that makes it feel much closer.
and if I were to roll
all the way back East like that
I wonder, for how many days would I feel too sick to stand?
I can shimmer, too,
if you hold me
to the light.
out here I have a painful purpose.
so I hypnotize myself
with the rolling
sandhills
the folding
of my bones
force = mass and acceleration
multiplied
so I keep the momentum,
find a tear in the velvet, and crawl inside until we’re home.
–
Meghan Aubuchon is a writer and visual artist pursuing a BFA in Communications Design and a Creative Writing minor at Pratt Institute. She grew up in rural Vermont and is currently based in Brooklyn. She is interested in the spaces between places, people, and time. Her work is an earnest attempt at translating intangible experiences of intimacy and the kinds of feelings that are hard to explain. Most recently, she has been interested in temporariness and how people and their spaces mutually affect each other. She is currently working on a book about every place where she has ever slept.
© 2022, Meghan Aubuchon
Halfway Down the Stairs 