Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers

GRAVIDA

The girl at the bottom of the well
hums the bear song hour on hour
to tell the town she is still alive.
The shaft walls the chilled stone
of a medieval cathedral. Above her,
a light in the door, the spyhole
where faces of minor saints revolve.
Already, everyone betrays her.
I have been here before, she tells herself,
her mind drawing out its spiral of rope,
hands ducking in and out of vapor.
Once, her body was anonymous,
no more than an envelope of fog. Ghost
I say when your hemispheres
touch the monitor’s dark.
Shouldn’t it move, I ask, knowing
what wish sinks through the answer
and just now you raise both arms—
there—one bent back, as if
tolling an invisible bell.
The only thing we know of you
is sound: a doppler of limbs,
the waters surrounding you
in low, windless chimes. That shush
as you turn suddenly towards us,
erase your spine’s precarious rungs.
O this is how you will enter
your own myth: in reverse,
ladderless. How we wish you wouldn’t
remember this. Either way, we are responsible.

ELIZABETH LINDSEY ROGERS is the author of two poetry collections, most recently The Tilt Torn Away from the Seasons (Acre Books/Cincinnati Review), a Rumpus Book Club selection. Her creative nonfiction can be found in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Travel Writing, and The Missouri Review. She lives in Washington, D.C. and is at work on a new collection of poems and a book of essays.