Hope for the Real World Lydia Wilkie

HOPE FOR THE REAL WORLD

Lydia Wilkie

So I’m washing our clothes in the pollen soaked lake, solid with algae bloom and dotted with contorted fish all wretched and white, bellies up to the sun.

I’ve become the unwilling solo audience to a chorus of mosquitoes, heavy with my blood, who sing in a pitch that will linger in my ears well past sleep.

I’m counting the moles on my arms and stomach, passing the time as quickly as it comes, sure that I feel the earth turning now.

The inflated scab on my knee has fully fallen off and leaves a hairless spot of bright pink flesh. Must be what my heart looks like when I let you see it, all amateur and virgin-like.

So I’m hanging our clothes in the cedar and watching the white caps a mile away. The threat of a slow death that the open water alludes

does illicit the same amount of fear in me as desire. I’m facing the wet blue beast while I swim to the island, in search of the real world-it must exist outside papa’s tulip patch and

mama’s soft freckled arms. So I’m peeling mangled tiger tails from the grill of a suburban woman’s bumper

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and cursing the human race. I’m watching an ant crawl the circumference of the same rock for twenty minutes and somehow feeling smaller.

I’m hoping hard that the mutilated world is just a fever dream, but every morning brings with it a haze around the sun, deeper scars in the earth,

and this dreadful feeling of impermanence. Pollenated waves at my feet swallow up the beached fish carcasses and I’m certain now that hope is just an empty word people use

as a coping mechanism. So I’m never owning a car and I’m letting my heart out, free and pulsing pink back into the real world where mama found it.

I’m thinking of the existence of that scabby, pastel thing, still beating in its ribbed jail cell for no reward other than the feeling of falling in love and hope for the mutilated world.

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