Issue #14 Online Exclusive Content
Act of God
Sara Henning
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
—James Wright, “A Blessing”
I.
1994
If I could call her an act of God, my Mother, I could believe in the earthquake unhinging her throat’s seabed. I could trust her decibels thrumming through me, vibrational frequencies juddering my cells until I am swept out into the sea of her. I was born in Savannah, love song fracturing my parent’s drug-fueled infatuation. We spent whole afternoons at the beach, my thighs gripping my mother’s hip where Bull River and Tybee Creek become the Atlantic Ocean. Even then, two-years-old, I couldn’t recognize pleasure from danger, her body from the water’s rising clutch. And later, when her voice slit the syllables of my name, susurrations knifing any long vowel she touched, our living room wallpaper was the night I walked into. I would risk its dark heat to touch the wild roses, thorns snaring my Levi’s, my T-shirt, the whole of me breaking into blossom. I trusted the miracle of transformation, my bedroom carpet the roiling sea I’d give my body to if I could get there fast enough, turn the lock as my mother beat her fists against the door. I delighted in floating, a comb jelly whipping my cilia, until she took a screwdriver to the hinges, my back the only interloper between her rage and my flesh. Her circular thinking, her barrage of slurs were my second language. I diagrammed her aspersions, tracked their imperative moods: go fuck yourself, eat shit and die. Our faces almost touching. Her cigarette-sleek breath. She’s after what she calls my little secrets: Robbie Longstreet’s apple bong, its pleasure ghost of ditch weed lifting me into a miracle of light; Mr. Hargrove’s garage at twilight, where I thieve Heineken from his rusty Frigidaire; my ten-speed Schwinn the only horse I’ll ever grip at the jugular, tear through our cul-de-sac, my unbrushed hair lit up by streetlights. How in those moments, heat igniting my skin, I felt almost alive.
II.
2016
I’m climbing a ladder at the GS Christmas tree farm in Nicholson, Georgia. My mother’s cancer is terminal. I’m testing the best fir’s needles with my fingers, hoping for a pine sharp and vicious as gin. I’m paying as my boyfriend bungee-straps a Douglas fir to the top of our Tahoe. I’m speeding toward Winterville, my mother’s Cape Cod on Bentwood Trail, Dollar Store tinsel glinting in the spell of her electric fireplace. This is her last Christmas. I am here to make meaning of sorrow. I’m the meteorologist who has spent her life immersed in satellite data, Doppler radars, radiosondes. I’m expert at mapping my mother’s moods, those amplified nodes of noradrenaline which signal mania or depression. I want a forecast model, an equation to calculate the excruciating days of morphine and Days of Our Lives on her sofa, how I sit, helpless, as she cries in her sleep, desire and pain coming furious and all at once. Cancer spreads through her liver. Her eyelids twitch as rogue cells split and multiply. When she sees the tree my man hoists through her foyer, hears my plans to dress it in icicle lights, pipe cleaner candy canes I twisted every Christmas in elementary school, she flames as if I’m a child again. Sara, get that out of here means throwing the Douglas fir in a gulley off Bob Godfrey Road. Her silence means I’m smiling my dead-girl smile, moving the pink Hello Kitty miniature tree from her living room’s bay window to where she can see it, Jengaing presents around it as they slip and break. I still dream I’m burning it down, that albatross she called beauty, that omen haunting her window year-round. She loved how it lit her spring gardenias, rouged the witches ringing her doorbell on Halloween. Shattered from yelling, she dozes to It’s a Wonderful Life on Turner Classic. I start dinner: DASH diet spaghetti I’ll dish into plastic cups. When she wakes, refuses to eat, I feed her with a spoon. I stand vigil as she sleeps, hold a compact mirror to her nose to check for breath. When I leave at New Year’s, I hide a bottle of Chandon Brut in her fridge, its bubbles glittering like life slipping ripe from her body. I want to believe my mother is an act of God. I want to trust love the way I trust a tsunami to kill. I want my mother to wake up, no longer dead by May, our faces almost touching, her voice bruising the syllables of my name.
Sara Henning is the author of the poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University. Please visit her at https://www.sarahenningpoet.com.
