No, she wasn’t meant to break like this—
windowless room, fluorescent light, the poem
she composed last night as she fell asleep
unraveling. She was meant to break as a line
breaks, as a wave breaks, as a voice breaks.
She’s spent so many years loading ink,
unjamming paper. Developing
spinal X-rays in the dark. Dragging trash
behind the loading dock, brown juice
leaking from the bag as she inhaled fry grease,
hot dumpster wind. Asking the caller
for his customer ID as he confessed his flowering
plum tree simply would not flower, and no,
he didn’t want to buy or return anything—
all he wanted was a good, hard spanking.
She’s been searching the want ads, finding
prospects in trucking, life modeling, private
investigation. She’s been weighing her time
like an orange, measuring the price
of a sandwich, a movie, a beer in eight-dollar
hours of her life. She remembers all the ways
she has made herself small—piping down,
shrinking into her seat, drinking mugs of coffee
to stunt her growth as a kid, stirring sweet milk
into bitter grounds. Today she goes out.
She walks between the shadows of glass towers
where the soundtrack in her mind is steady jazz,
where the steel Christmas tree is dismantled,
where the ice rink is drained, and the frozen cake
of water—sliced by skates and healed each afternoon—
finally breaches its borders, melting into the street.
She crosses a yellow bridge whose name
she doesn’t know, to stand at its center, to watch
the Allegheny or Monongahela River—she can never
remember which—wrinkle under the pressure
of wind, barge, rescue boat. She breathes. She hears
the traffic rush and turn. She feels herself a creature
in a body, unbroken, breathing over the punched
tin of a river that reflects her hair, the dishrag sky,
gray clouds trying on shapes like thrift-store dresses.
An earlier version of this poem first appeared in Narrative as “Break Room.” Thanks to the editors for selecting it as a finalist in the journal’s Annual Poetry Contest.
Sarah Burke 