When She Comes Down from the Mountain
by Carolyn Oliver
“If a person who has lived at sea level meets up with his twin who has lived in the mountains, he will find that his sibling is slightly older than he.”
— Carlo Rovelli, from Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, translated by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre
When she comes down from the mountain, her hair sheds ice and pine, and her clothes are bleached soft by a closer sun. In our joined shadow, her compact form nestles like a denned fox, in the way (before we breathed air) we twined our limbs in Gordian knots. Surgeons cut our mother wide and fast, then drew us out as one nearly strangled squirm of flesh. Until she left the sea for the mountain, we grew like a spill of water seeping across canvas: impossible to tell where our edges began and ended, who led or followed or evaporated, atom by atom, drawn in with a breath.
Now, under lavender-copper lilacs in their dying season, she takes my hand to pull me, laughing, toward the cold sea. Between waves we dig trenches, scooping wilting red fronds that susurrate away. I pluck one from her hand and glimpse beneath her ring a fleck of brown, like a snail’s shell swirled among clam pieces before the tide brings them back home. On my skin: a shadow, a mere eddy in the sand. Then I know (as I watch her lean into the salt spray that soaks her sleeve and stars her hair with pearls) my sister has traveled ahead of me.
When she goes back to her mountain, trades sea whispers for rock scrambles and glacier lakes, I will find a new mountain twice as high as hers and make my home there under the sharp sun, until we return to Earth and time together.
Carolyn Oliver’s very short prose and prose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Indiana Review, Jellyfish Review, jmww, Unbroken, Tin House Online, CHEAP POP, Midway Journal, and New Flash Fiction Review, among other journals. Carolyn lives in Massachusetts with her family. Links to more of her writing can be found at carolynoliver.net.
See what happens when you click below.
What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “When She Comes Down from the Mountain”? This piece started out over two years ago as a poem in blank verse, which I began as soon as I finished reading Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (highly recommended). Although I was pleased with the content of the poem, I kept fiddling with the stanza breaks; I could never quite land on a set that made the poem the strongest version of itself. And then out of the blue, a few months ago, I realized I could try recasting it in prose, and then it came together—not effortlessly, but more quickly than I imagined possible.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
09/15 • Abbie Doll
09/22 • Karen Regen Tuero
09/29 • Amy Speace
10/06 • Jennifer Edwards
10/13 • Joseph O’Day
10/20 • Carolyn Zaikowski
10/27 • Sunmisola Odusola
11/03 • Sara Cassidy
11/10 • Liz Abrams-Morley
11/17 • Alison Colwell
11/24 • Lucy Zhang
12/01 • TBD
12/08 • TBD
12/15 • TBD
12/22 • TBD
12/29 • TBD
11/17 • TBD
11/24 • TBD
12/01 • TBD
12/08 • TBD
12/15 • TBD
12/22 • TBD
12/29 • TBD