Hot & Heavy

by Alina Pleskova

 

I haven’t learned how to ride commotion, only to enter it like a current. Or invite it in. For many years, almost every weekend, I loved elbowing my way to the front of some VFW hall or church basement or dingy venue & getting sucked into a whorl of limbs.

You could call it brute, with a flimsy tether of trust. It could be said that I got what I expected.

*

In Portugal, I kept getting breathless. As in, my breathing was very off. When I coughed or sneezed or inhaled deeply or picked up something heavy, intense pain shot through the right side of my body.

*

I process on a delay. Real time doesn’t move slowly enough, not when much of the enjoyment for me is to blur it. The near-impossible balance of both experiencing & being a little elsewhere.

*

I don’t mention it, but they often seem to sense it. This is one way to see how the breathlessness came to happen.

*

The extent to which it was done wasn’t intentional. I decided that was true, much in the same way I decide to trust someone, however briefly, because it appears they can give me a portion—even if just a sliver—of what I want.

I idly looked up phrases like blunt force a few times afterward, unsure of what I needed to see. Then I picked up my big red backpack, winced, got on a plane.

*

There’s always some lesson I want to believe arrived with total & implementable clarity while traveling. As if, in transit, I can perceive something that my quotidian self—with her staid entanglements, her debts, her worries—couldn’t possibly grasp. But all I feel, really, is a want to lessen the heavy filter of potentiality. How it blurs my sense.

*

The air in Lisbon, then Porto, was perfect: breezy, ringed with brine. Mostly there were three of us & mostly we walked, smoked, drank wine, rested, repeated. What else was there? Bougainvillea, blue & white porcelain plates, cobblestone & laundry lines, steep hills, easy meals, late dusk, honeyed dawn.

*

I don’t remember how I explained the source of my pain out loud. I took ibuprofen, lost track of time. A mouth replaced the mouth before it. Everywhere we went & everyone we met affirmed that the night was beautiful, & the Anthropocene will be where the human timeline cuts off, & no one knows where to begin to try & un-fuck it.

I cut my toes on jagged beach rocks, rammed a motor scooter against my ankle, drunk sparked a lighter backwards & singed my fingers. You could say I wasn’t paying attention, or that I was trying to relocate something.

I don’t know any better, until I do, until the next time. I sleep with a rose quartz next to my head, try to dream of gentle landings.

 

Alina Pleskova is a poet, editor, and Russian immigrant turned proud Philadelphian. Her full-length poetry collection, Toska, will be out from Deep Vellum in 2023. More at alinapleskova.com or @nahhhlina on Twitter.

 

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