Emerged
I see you, I touch you, I breathe onto your face, flutter. A sunken kingdom, this grounding in proximity. The elegance of in person, of presence. We don’t distinguish between this version and that, before and after. The duplicates stand around, and the originals— no, unimportant, indistinguishable. We try to behave like human beings. We sit in a circle, let our body become the torch, dry out the old rooms, find the old habits, brush along the floors and gather debris. We breathe the dust in and breathe it out. We are civilized people. You see me, you touch me, flicker. Something buried washed away. In the rubble, you find a mirror where you can confront your double—you don’t recognize her, and I’m not looking, my hands buried in the still-wet clay, making more bodies. Floods recede, broken branches, piles of bleached bricks in the shape of hotels. An old man on a bicycle. You seem taller in person. Smaller. You and I and you and I go looking for the water line, for the stain on the wall that divides eras, for the wash away and merge, for the mother who let it rain. We find an inexplicable chair, a plastic bowl, our arms and our eyes, all the things she couldn’t stop.
Imposter
We shout into auditoriums, lecture halls, the alleys and brick walls, splinters like veins and reverb. We close our eyes to hear, surrounded. Doubled voices.
The building where there was another building six months ago.
Form, figure, function: the smooth surface, and shudder that comes back to the gut. We want to ignore layers. Like we don’t see double.
So much has changed, we say when we visit. Everything looks the same.
Sound swells like a body in water. We wander into a chorus, get lost between song and overtone. Warm water. Someone kicks the time. We could document, record. Actual drowning is quiet. The buttons and pulses, the calm surface after sinking. You never see it happen, even a few feet away.
The single voice and the tone that happens. The ring.
Someone is kicking you, hard, thumping at your belly, your hand at the spot. You say nothing. The buzz in our ears. You close your eyes. What we bury. Another parking garage, another condo, trees going in. Double-pitched and dry: a truck backing up and the warning that echoes, blocks away.
Reclaimed
Woman: you are decision. The prism hanging in the windowsill, the bounce between said and imagined. Say, refraction, say, desire. So many eyes. You speak, you silence, and the specter, the voice saying, Calm down, woman. This, you think, could be the language of mothers. It is universal, they say. All the symmetry, as if before and after are equal.
Callista Buchen is the author of the chapbooks The Bloody Planet (Black Lawrence Press, October 2015) and Double-Mouthed (forthcoming 2016, dancing girl press). Her work appears in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, Fourteen Hills, and many other journals, and she is the winner of the Langston Hughes Award and DIAGRAM's essay contest. She is an assistant professor at Franklin College in Indiana.