Thralls

Kevin McIlvoy

Look what we’ve done,

my mother said, her

chill voice barely

emitting sound. We were

lost – lost just two

blocks from home

because our unfit

brains had overbrimmed.

Our migraines synced so often

that by routine we could

find each other in our flares

of pain. I could take in

hand our most dreamlike

enigma. She could do the

same. We could walk

like crystallizing blazes.

We could travel the streets

into darkest space’s

dire coldness, we could weep

together and say nothing.

Could continue walking.

Mother’s grandmother called

them “thralls,” told her that

God sent them. If

you asked her why, she

smiled, explained that

God does not explain. If you

persisted in questioning, she would

say the ten words she and all

her forebears had learned to say:

Why don’t you make a little poem of your self-pity?

Cold helped her and

her daughter cope, so, in

winter thralls they walked

outside lightly clothed, their

bare feet, head, hands exposed

in order to feel relief

from the electrical discharges

subvisible to everyone but them.

One early morning after

a cyclonic snowstorm, the old

woman was found dead,

her hands and arms and

hips embracing the slender

trunk of a red oak ten feet

away from the front

door of her home.

And? And? What happened to her

daughter who went with her? What?

I asked. I knew the chill hand in

mine remembered her mother’s

hand and the hand of

her mother’s mother.

I knew the ten words of censure that would come.

Lightning and lesser lightning, we

walked. Apart. And with each other.