The Consequence Is What’s Real by Wende Crow
You let him buy you a sandwich at the bus station, and you let him carry your bags to the bus. Sit in an aisle seat and close your eyes and listen to The English Patient dubbed in Spanish. Open your eyes later and not know how much later and look out the window at the twin volcanoes belching smoke. Listen to endless violins in the desert.
You wake up earlier than everyone else for five weeks and ride thirty buses by yourself. Eat sliced papaya out of a Ziploc bag on the beach. Drift down canals cut through mangrove forests with soft limestone all over your face. You learn how to be alone where the river meets the sea and take off all your clothes and get in the water and go all the way under, how to not hate what you’re doing.
Be amused at everything you let go. Laugh at a face looking up at you while you look down out of the bus window.
Forgive yourself this inelegance, even as it is illuminating itself to you. Today it is only you, welcoming it. Today it is all you can touch.
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About the Author
Wende Crow
Born: Atlanta, Georgia
Now Resides: Murfreesboro, Tennessee
Bio: I put food on the table teaching English as a second language. My poems have appeared in Ploughshares and LIT. On the whole, I can’t complain.
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image by s0n-et-lumiere.
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