64°10′N 51°43′W
Smooth as freshly palmed icing (I never understood how she got it
so neat around the fruit cake), the ice sheet I dreamed of
that summer, in rooms alive with air conditioners
and insects, her hands swelling too big to mix the batter
the ice in my glass drained and split into three lakes, in a grandmotherly
way she kept re-filling, asking if I was hungry, I spent the afternoon
going to the toilet. In the dream I fled across a tundra, under
never landing birds, circling and rolling like tyres. Under the snow
a huge canyon, an unlocked snake jaw filled with hardening earth.
Pregnancy put such strange thoughts in my head.
The soreness in my muscles like stiffening into a living
statue, I told him to find a nice place outside, in the sun and leave me.
It wasn’t easy, being in that body. The Pilates instructor went around the
class and knew better than to ask me how I felt, as I sat there
preparing a list of injury. You could have drunk water from the crater
in my back, sparse towns and villages resisting shoals of black pebble
and gravel, up along the spine, the coast, the sea spitting from endless
channels, lungs blowing air the shape of chandeliers.
Every day I took up a little more space, and my body became a
landmass, de-platformed old ideas of personhood. We were becoming
more and more similar, the continent and me. I put the co-ordinates
in my skin, struck out like a blind explorer.