Unanswerable

By: Rachael Riley

I ask for your address

so I can come kiss you

and ask the courier the difference

between delivery and deliverance.

While I wait for replies to my enquiries

I circle parking lots, wanted ads,

a crushed frog on the pavement.

A friend tells me

the city of her would be empty without me

and the fullness of that sits

beneath my clavicle like a high heart.

A buoyancy that pulls my head under

whenever I stand ankle deep in ocean.

I must resemble an unlikely scaup —

beak down, arse up, listening to the rocks

suffering the wave’s retreat. Retreat!

I pull my head up dripping

and check with my surroundings.

No one around me knows

why you struggle to turn dots into letters.

Maybe that is the wrong language.

Let me cast a wider net.

If you wanted to, wouldn’t you?

But there is plenty I want today

that I do not follow because

the sky looks particularly perilous

and work has been really hard lately

and an old woman frowns at my jacket and says

it’s not even cold.

And perhaps I do not deserve the certainty of seasons

because later when the clouds I foreshadowed trundle over the sun

and the wind gets that seaside nip in it,

I hope, wherever that woman is,

that her silk shawl flutters its inadequacy

and her bare ankles grow a chill

right above the talus.

I ask a closed window whether talus

comes from talon. Whether unkindness

has its root in perceive.

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Rachael (they/them) is a neurodivergent Pākehā (settler) writer from Aotearoa, New Zealand, currently living and working in Tiohti:áke, Montreal. Their work has been longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize and the Malahat New Horizons Award and was a winner of The Masters Review Debut Fiction Prize.