when you burned down my house i tried to rebuild: monuments of soot trampled beliefs trying to pull meaning from the inside of a cedar tree and i carved. i carved you, next to a motherless god, a wifeless god, a god that poured fires over still waters and begged to be left alone behind a curtain, gold rods and gold seams fraying at the end like the veins that tied me to you, kept us sprouting branches instead of scorched forest, the center of the earth crumbling into itself a dead leaf; a home turned skeleton.
Mother pushes us out the door and across the porch, yelling for us to hurry up, like it’s a race to see who gets there first. The sound of her keys jingling around worries me, making me wonder what would happen if she dropped them down between the slats of wood beneath our feet. My sister freezes in place, tears in her eyes even as she tries to hold them back – and I realize she’s holding us back. Her feet are bare like mine, but I’ve already made it to the car while hers are stuck in place; our black cat walks over and rubs up against her leg, unaware that this is an emergency.
“Come on,” my mother says, reaching
her arm out, urging my sister to get in the car. … ...continue reading
A
fledgling fell from the steep
elm branches last night, never learning
to fly. We crept over dew, thinking it asleep,
and learned the truth.
Hallmark strangeness of childhood, finding things can die. Like learning our parents had names, it tumbled us out of ourselves into an expanding world where the metallic twist of pennies on tongues echoed in blood.
Life released slowly to us, unfolding its creases—a map of courtesies letting us stay small and close. But it rushed when we lifted feathers limp and cold, light, and folded death in a box atop a broken nest.
If life came all at once, we could never learn to breathe, to speak. Never learn bird and flight and tree, fall or death or broken, never blink or become ourselves.… ...continue reading
Ari Rosenschein is a Seattle-based writer whose essays and fiction appear in Entropy, Noisey, Drunk Monkeys, P.S. I Love You, Observer, The Big Takeover, PopMatters, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch Los Angeles. A lifelong musician, Ari currently records and performs with his bands, The Royal Oui and STAHV. He lives with his wife and dog and enjoys the woods, the rain, and the coffee of his chosen region. Coasting is his first book.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Rosenschein about the creation and reception of Coasting, as well as his experiences as a musician and music journalist.
