I keep thinking about this one time I took John to Lincoln Center to see Top Hat. As memories go, it’s a nice one, I mean, in the context of this life which feels so formless. Taking the train uptown, holding hands, watching Rogers and Astaire leap over the big white set, feathers flying. It beats washing your hands for two minutes, I’ll say that. Take how the phrase delivery window was just said by the radio announcer, unfurled from his evening rattle of misfortune—interviews, doctors, the one who got sick, the nursing home manager, the woman at home with three kids like me. . . On garbage day the lawns sprout cardboard boxes and manufactured wood furniture. Everyone is getting rid of things. Getting new things instead. I get it—it’s just how we’re built, supposedly, it’s how we hum along. How we cope. Ho hum. Also kindness rocks, god the Midwest is dotted them. I would sharpen my teeth on their slogans. I never meant to raise my own children, not all the time, anyhow. Not like this. Some days I really miss John, but really what I miss is when people could seem like whole cities instead of swamps. Me too, it’s like I’m wading into the soft waters of Lethe, except the river is a bunch of stinking laundry and it runs through my shitty basement where I teach online and two ungrateful cats stalk around behind me. I’m grateful just to be alive, though. Once, years ago, hailing a taxi in the Bowery I passed a woman on her phone saying Tell me not to be sad with such, I don’t know, Americanness, such gusto, it was enough to make me go on. I don’t know about you, but right about now I could really go for a girl with those on-trend lucite glasses or a bearded bartender pouring a soda wiping his hands on his canvas overalls. Even a man with a wry smile he’s always pulling up by the belt loops, a man like John. Outside my window my kids wrestle our hastily adopted dog. What is it Rosencrantz says, about the indifferent children of the earth? Yes: Happy, in that we are not over-happy; on fortune's cap we are not the very button.
Alison Powell's prose and poetry have appeared widely, in journals including A Public Space, Michigan Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She is the author Boats in the Attic (Fordham University Press, 2022) and a chapbook of lyric essays titled The Art of Perpetuation (Black Lawrence Press 2020). She is professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University.
Photo credit: David Zawila