The engines. The buses. The bustle.
A December Monday with students
eager to be released. Above, snowflakes
eager to erupt. Like candy in a piñata belly.
Like bad news on the tip of a tongue.
Like the crackling of a school loudspeaker
when the morning announcement begins.
When the principal reports your friend
is dead.
When you are stunned. Vision blackening.
Breathing belabored. When the floor caves in
and there is nowhere but the Blackbox.
Where a choir teacher and theatre director stand,
staring at their outstretched palms. Wondering
if they shrunk or if the world grew too heavy.
Behind them, the classroom door—
a cave to the unimaginable.
Inside, set pieces from a decade
of musicals arranged in reunion:
End tables from the Beast’s library holding tissues.
The couch of Eliza Doolittle’s elocution lessons
holding friends holding each other. The silence
that only opened for cries of mourning.
The darkness cultured on the walls. The ceiling.
Multiplying. Creeping into every space.
Filling our backpacks. Twisting into
our shoelace braids. Coating our chests.
The world turning so
slow. Spinning so fast, blurring
the week until the funeral. The service.
Where we sing “Shosholoza,”
the Zimbabwe choral arrangement you loved:
Shosholoza kulezo ntaba.
Move forward on those mountains.
Wen' uyabaleka kulezo ntaba.
You are running away on those mountains.
You have climbed the mountains into heaven
and now we cannot catch you.
Singing to a church’s top balcony. Our ears
searching for answers in the crescendos.
The wavering decrescendos, not written in the score.
Throats closing, burning. Inflamed with frustration
that a place could be better than here.
Our conductor lowering his hands
to his heart. The fermata ending.
The hush covering the choir. The falling
into arms. The wailing of your mother
like the Pietà—a shrieking siren
guiding the hearse to the cemetery.
The graveyard of frosted trees, barren in solidarity.
Observing. Standing above the abduction site
where aliens stole a sandwich of earth,
leaving behind a mahogany lunchbox
impersonating you. A priest lying.
His sermon the soundtrack to falling carnations
thrown into the ground. The delicate crash
of yellow petals on a coffin. The softer comprehension
that no one would create this world on purpose.
Blake Harrsch is a poet corporeally in New Jersey with a writer’s heart determined to capture stories beyond such geographic and temporal bounds. She is an English Literature Master's candidate and writing instructor at Seton Hall University. @blakeharrsch, blakeharrsch.com.
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