Issue 22
Winter 2020
Rivercrest
Melanie Figg
Her younger self was at the wheel. Way before
the turnoff she knows something is not right.
No houses in peripheral vision, the road like a movie reel, unraveling.
She pulls into her neighborhood to find it
gone. Snow covers the worst of it—eases
her head around the unreal: a box wrapped in wet eels,
a spinning jenny coughing out omens, a lid that won’t click shut
no matter what. Doubt turns her eyes back over the empty field.
She nearly missed the turn. Surely, the road sign is wrong.
There is nothing here.
Where once a forked road and 60 ratty modular duplexes. Where once her bike path and her babysitting gigs. Where once her teenage shame in their new rich town. Where once her learning to drive a stick. Where once her older sister’s mind cracked and dried on the hospital sheets.
All vanished.
Memories bulldozed, time flattened into one dimension.
If the site of memory vanishes, does memory vanish?
She walks in the cold pre-holiday air with her husband. But he’s not really there. He’s part of a past that wasn’t, so there is no path that led to him, and no path leads back to him. He’ll have to become something else unanchored by history.
Her walk down memory lane has gone all wrong. What the fuck now?
Where houses, only snow. Where roads, foot prints of humans
and animals. Where driveways, no answers. The air moves and chills around her.
She stops a woman walking a black dog, asks them where the houses have gone. Army research, toxic groundwater. The snow squeaks under her boots. She wants to go. Her mind scampers and follows the dog’s huff, breathing in the vapors, nuzzling loose the ground. They tore it all down years ago, moved everyone out.
Filed down sidewalks into panic, into minivans. Sidewalks, mercifully under snow cover, that lead to no-door, no-house. No-family with her sister on the ward, and mother always overtimed. Father gone with the lost years, evaporating … neural pathways dead-ended by carcinogens, army jargon. A memory palace left abandoned, so she stands in the cold staring at a stranger and her dog-self snouting.
Years ago. Years and years ago. Her years here, go, years ago.
About the Author
Melanie Figg is a poet from Maryland. In her award-winning debut collection, Trace, from New Rivers Press, “Figg kindles broken, dying embers into a roaring memorial for the voiceless.”(Kirkus starred review) Melanie’s writing awards include Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The McKnight Foundation, and the Maryland State Arts Council. Her poems have been published in dozens of journals, including LIT, Colorado Review, and The Iron Horse Literary Review. Melanie teaches writing in the DC area, offers women’s writing retreats, and works remotely with all kinds of writers.
Find her at: www.melaniefigg.net.