julie gard / essay

Raw Materials

Sometimes a child needs a parent, a hand, a someone. We took her out of her life, we did. Gave her an apple, a medicine, a clean broom. A shelf of books. A place to rage. A bicycle bell. A thermometer. A lock on the door. A yard of peonies. A drawer of cutlery. A little crown. Soft summer shoes. The same sun. The same skin. A swallowed new language. Always and only translations. A wooden home, a toy car on a rope, and a spotted dog. A certain bedtime.

*

This quiet street, striped with tree shadows, is as familiar as anything I’ve ever known. A car passes over, then it’s back to itself, like it never bore a burden. The light bounces off a van’s silver trim, makes a pinhole star. Next to the bit of sunspiked metal, a luggage rack is shaped from snow, formed and fondant. The license plate is missing a bolt.

*

A friend I was supposed to visit rests in the dark with an awful headache, her lentil soup burbling on the stove. My feet are warm in thin socks from the steady exhale of the car heater. I could fall asleep here, slowly and down, dropping the pen on top of the journal. Again I didn’t sleep well. 

*

A freewrite is a mind-track over the course of a beginner’s shoddy meditation session. On a good day, call me an expert of digression, an aficionado of the backbeat turn, the improvised ear-piercing, the door that opens without a hand. Creaks, releases, to reveal a roomful. Everything taken, nothing dusted. Call it treasure or junk, or just too much. 

*

There’s a poppy seed in my daughter’s belly. The sky is mad blue, and the temperature is two or six, depending on who you ask. At the center of the cold a steady warmth. I search for the horizon, for that dependable level that will keep me standing. 

*

The furnace going, the quiet breath of the house. An exhale with no audible inhale. Somewhere, though, the warm machine breathes in. I wake and think of my struggling nephew. How my own mind has fought, its anxious cracks. How I have tried to stay, have succeeded in staying, on path. 

*

I have spent my life afraid. The closeness that is the biggest dream is also the scariest. If I put something between us, I’m safe, but I never get what I want. But I get this dance. I get to feel it forever, how we’re close, how we’re apart. It makes it true. I get to feel how something is possible, though never actually happening. We get to dance at arm’s length. What if we stepped in? Sometimes we do. I may as well be who I am now. I feel much better when I’m here, when I let myself love you.

*

The soul of every breathing thing: I am with it, burrowed in the yard. The robins’ bellies flash orange as they flap in the snow, weave through heavy pine branches, a round little flock. Not what they were planning, not their—not my—story of spring. We were not expecting, not quite prepared.

*

How did the dog’s undercoat reach the wooden upper door of the kitchen cabinet? Our hair and skin breaks loose, apparently, to coat Arctic Dreams and Annals of the Former World. Time to toss the Valentine’s flowers onto a surface of snow. Time to make way for the indoor begonia to keep growing, growing. Time to pull the white sheets from the bed, shaking off the socks and sun. Yesterday in the kitchen, I brushed the dog, and we swam in fur together. We made the biggest mess, so today I am cleaning. He is sleek and cared for and soft, in the quietly asking house.

*

It’s time to give up on peace that will ever be separate from the tragic. I don’t think I even want it anymore, or believe that I can have it. I’m so tired I could scream, and beneath that I love them, more than I ever did. I fear I’ll never sort it out. I’ll spend my whole life in this ball pit of feeling, with bright orbs coated in other kids’ spit, in my homemade pink sweater and flyaway hair. Suspended in that state of caught breath before the laugh and the air come out.

*

I will forgive you, and myself, again and again. We will find another way. The pressure is great—so let it go. Breathe out like the furnace, endless. Know the power of fire. Let it keep you alive. All of you, in April snow, in day after difficult day, alive. In the movement beyond exhaustion, alive. Know your right to sun from a torn sky. 

*

The bean with kicking feet, each leg .67 centimeters. A tiny tadpole, a little living, a seedling. A start, a startling. My daughter’s next stage. I prepare to hold and to release. A delight, its own ballast, our forever change. How serious, how small.

*

The stone in my pocket is almost the shape of a skull, chin like an arrow. The surface, so smooth and pale pink, shows crosshatches like veins like marbled meat like trauma layers—surface ice and frozen depth. A sliver, a slip, broken off from something else. We are each of us popped out and snipped, an overspill, a sample of earth. A bit of soft solid. One little pink scrap. With all of its edges, weapon and chin. Each of us this much ourselves, so independent with our singular, plural pronouns. Walk around for a while. Enjoy.

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Julie Gard's prose poetry collection I Think I Know You was a finalist for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award. Additional collections include Home Studies and Scrap: On Louise Nevelson, and her essays, stories, and poems have appeared in Gertrude, Clackamas Literary Review, Blackbox Manifold, and other journals. She lives in Duluth, Minnesota and teaches writing at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. You can find her online at www.juliegard.com.