Sylvie Maren Reinwick

I have always thought God could have made me more convincing. If He was going to make my life this unfortunate, the least He could have done was provide visible compensation bright enough to survive first impressions, a talent that would excuse the inconvenience of knowing me, a face people might forgive for whatever follows it. A placeholder occupying its own coordinates, floating, not tragic enough in the right way to be interesting. Instead I seem to have been given the less marketable arrangement of things. A certain tendency toward difficulty. A talent for making a problem out of whatever room has been kind enough to contain me. It does not seem to matter how carefully I move. I have failed to anticipate certain consequence, alteration in the atmosphere after I have gone, the sort of thing no one mentions because mentioning it would require admitting that I was the cause. At the end of day, I will slam the door shut, But I’ll never barricade it. Who dare knock? Who stands in the hallway hearing the hinge settle into its old complaint. I suspect there is something migratory in ruin. It does not require an invitation. It has an excellent sense of direction. I can leave the windows latched, carry my shoes in my hands and still wake to find them nesting beside the curtains. If someone were to love me, I think I would spend the first year cataloguing the discrepancies the margin between my face and whatever face they'd hung upon it. What must it be, to be awaited? To have another's attention lean toward the door before your hand finds the knob. There must be a vertigo in it to learn that in the walled country of another's mind, I’ll cavort at the parish line. I cannot picture myself inside.

Something older than language has taken hold of me. I have tried, unsuccessfully, to locate the origin of this pull. Optimism is a condition of his existence, or how the mind moves in application He speaks, and the world is less theoretical. He listens, and the world is less hostile. Time does not pass cleanly in his vicinity. Seconds stretch and resist, layering themselves one over the other until the moment no longer feels singular. Disarmament festers in how easily I am undone by him, the silencing of a system long accustomed to vigilance. I forget the necessity of precision. Even speech betrays me coherence itself has become unnecessary. We exist, frequently, in what should amount to nothing: conversations that dissolve as quickly as they are formed, exchanges without consequence, yet I leave them altered, meaning smuggled quietly into the trivial. And then, we descend into depth, into questions that summon the soul to reckoning. I feel the compass of your eyes tracing me across days I do not share with you, their shape and weight so exact they could hold the world without effort. Everyone I encounter already knows you, as if your soul has been rehearsing its benevolence in rooms you have never entered through me. The flaws you carry do not read as damage here. They are asymmetries in a design too precise to be accidental, imperfections that refuse correction because they are the very geometry that makes you hold.

I drove until the houses in my peripheral disappeared past the county line, past the radio towers There was a twenty-four-hour place with buzzing lights and paper flowers I bought a coffee I didn't want just to have somewhere to sit The girl behind the counter said, “You look like you're waiting for something.” I said, “I'm not.” But I was I was waiting for the night to change waiting for the signs to rearrange waiting for a little accident to make this town feel sentient I kept driving past the same three streets Maybe I don't need to know where I'm going Maybe I just need somewhere to be. The windows were full of strangers buying things beneath the fluorescent glow A child counted quarters A woman sang along to something low And I thought, maybe everybody's lonely in their own particular way Maybe that's why the lights stay on long after everybody's gone away I was waiting for the night to change waiting for the signs to rearrange waiting for a little accident to make this town feel sentient I kept driving past the same three streets Maybe I don't need to know where I'm going Maybe I just need somewhere to be. At two, the grocery store was empty except for me and the humming refrigerators I stood beneath the freezer lights reading labels like they were letters Nothing called me anywhere nothing asked me to become I took an orange from the pile and held it like a little sun I left the keys in the ignition let the engine breathe against the dark I watched the traffic lights change colors with no one there to tell them when to stop And maybe that's enough maybe that's enough to keep becoming someone without knowing who I drove until the morning found me around the edges of the road The same town was waiting when I got there but I wasn't looking for it anymore I don't know where I'm going I don't know what I'll become But the sky was opening above me and I was already moving on The radio lost the station somewhere past the county line A voice came through the static then disappeared before the punchline I laughed for no reason and the sound surprised me I hadn't heard myself do that in a long, long time.

I can’t eat, I won’t speak You're decomposing before me I'm frantic and curdled inside Your voice cuts right through me Like bleach on chapped skin, viciously The sting spreads slow and sure Don't tell me you're disappearing into distance I thought the space between our hands was something pulling us back Now I'm standing, wondering what my foolish heart forgot When I left it in your hands and gave you everything I had Bleach is rising, crawling through the cracks Don't let it in, let it in My pride won Now the white keeps spreading And I think I know how this ending I follow your shadow, trace the shape of your window It's peculiar how you picture me now. Everything I touch turns white Everything I loved loses its light A piece of my soul has gone opaque I scrub until my fingertips bleed Now I'm just the stain that won't come clean. Everything I touch turns to bleach And I can't wash my hands Can't wash my hands I can't wash my hands clean My heart keeps breaking as I'm disappearing into distance You thought the space between our hands was something pulling us back Now you're standing wondering what your foolish heart forgot When you left it in my hands and gave me everything you had Bleach is rising, crawling through the cracks Don't let it in, let it in My pride won Now the white keeps spreading I already know how this is ending I could curl up into a ball every morning But what would that do? I turn away from every mirror I’m afraid to see my own face When every reflection shows an image of you You're always somewhere soaking Through the walls and through my thinking All those warnings about poison Maybe they were true Even when you're nowhere near the room I'm stained by you I pour the bottle out Pour the bottle out But the white fills my lungs Sleep is just another thing I forgot how to do I'm stained by you I hear your voice somewhere beyond me Every word still pulls me through It catches underneath my breath And turns the whole night back to you What can I do? You're always somewhere soaking Through the walls and through my feelings All those warnings about poison Maybe they were true I take one step Then another Keep moving Slowly, I turn past every tile every corner Even when you're nowhere to be found I'm stained by you I wash my hands But the chemicals on my body won’t clear I wash my hands I wash my hands Why are you still here?

The garden party began at four, with gloves arranged beside the door and hats pinned neatly, brim to brim, while afternoon grew soft at the rim. At the tea table, every place had been measured out with equal grace. The china wore its palest, finest blue. A spoon was moved a fraction; then moved back into view. Lemon meringue in little squares, red velvet waiting beneath silverware, and every compliment arrived with something polished, something contrived. A woman praised another's dress, the careful waist Another touched the other's sleeve, to smooth what scarcely needed leave. At church, the tables had been set with flowers no one dared to get too close to, lest a petal fall and trouble the arrangement of it all. There were biscuits No. Lemon meringue again, and red velvet arranged like little crimson gems. A lady declined, then thanked the hand that offered twice, as manners planned. She smiled. She lifted up her cup. She drank. She never looked up. By evening, dresses swept the stone, each hem immaculate and known. The garden emptied by degrees, chairs left beneath the thinning trees. Then down the street, the antique store held yesterday behind its door. Silver slept in velvet rows, old porcelain with painted bows, a cabinet full of things that stayed exactly where their owners had them laid. One little cup, hairline-cracked, was lifted, admired, then put back. “Oh, don’t worry, it’s quite alright.” It’s all rather dainty divine when nothing has to cross the line. At a quarter to seven, the guests withdrew, their gloves still white, their manners too. Scarfs fastened neatly at the throat, pearls tucked beneath a winter coat. The hostess counted every plate. The smallest cup was slightly late. It was found beneath the garden chair, beside one glove and a fallen hair. No one remarked upon the blue. No one remembered who last knew. The cup was washed. The shelf was wiped. The tablecloth was folded right. And in the evening, as before, the gloves would wait beside the door. Cabinets were locked at half-past nine. Tomorrow, everything would be fine. In the morning, as always before, the silver would shine once more.

There's a fawn in the garden again. She's not supposed to be here. She knows it. I know it. The fence knows it, which is why it keeps pretending it has a gap it doesn't have, and letting her through anyway. She is smaller than a deer ought to be. She moves like she's apologizing for the floor. She eats the tulips my mother planted and doesn't know they were planted, or does know, and eats them anyway, which I respect more. The thing about a fawn is that it will not run from you. It will stand very still and look at you with eyes that make you lower your voice, and you will find yourself whispering in your own backyard, to a trespasser, about nothing. She is not tame. She is not gentle. She has simply learned that stillness is armor, and smallness is argument, and if she is quiet enough, people will decide she belongs here, and then she will. I have watched her do it. I have watched her do it to me. If you come out back tonight, she'll be there. She always is. Standing in the dark like she's been invited, like the garden is hers, she probably even has papers to prove it. Don't lower your voice. She's counting on you fawning over her.

I cannot wait to meet my healed self Sprinting and crying in her arms For we have been through A great deal of despair together I surmise I will know her instantly. Not by the strength in her stride, nor by the easy rhythm of her breathing, but by the look in her eyes the alertness of someone who once measured every morning to determine what remained of herself. We will stand there for a moment, studying each other. She will hold my face and search it and I will search hers as one might hold a photograph for proof that it was worth it. I imagine she laughs more softly than I do now. Yet I hope she remembers. Not the agony itself, but the weight of enduring it. The nights spent bargaining. The futures built and rebuilt from the rubble of plans. I do not want to meet a stranger. I want to meet the woman who gathered every broken version of me, every frightened and furious shard, and carried them safely across the river when I could not. The body did not win every battle. Neither did we. But enough of us crossed the finish line to become you.

Craving pinches of your warmth Is sitting in a movie theater alone. It’s the alien, yet peaceful feeling of contentment Integrated with heart-wrenching forsakenness. The screen flickers with borrowed lives, Settling over vacant seats lovers finding one another in the span of two hours as tens of strangers lean toward the same light. The comfort is borrowed. The ache is mine. They breathe in unison, grieve on cue, laugh at the same precise second as if someone had reached inside us and found the hidden wire connecting each chest. But when the credits begin to crawl, the spell loosens. People gather their jackets, their conversations, the small gravity they exert upon one another. I remain seated until the final name disappears, watching the blank screen glow faintly, like a window left illuminated for someone who was never coming.

A photograph curls up beneath a kitchen light left burning, their faces whitening over the gloss, my brother somewhere in the middle of it, my parents standing behind him, and behind them the older faces, each one softened by distance. each one giving the camera less to keep. Silence settles after someone says everything is fine, after it all shivers, every generation becoming harder to see without becoming any less present. Is suffering merely sequential? No, An unfortunate thing follows another until eventually the arithmetic exhausts itself, but some equations seem to have discovered how to reproduce. They travel without luggage. I have watched people I love make dinner after terrible news, laugh at tables where woe had already taken a seat, go to sleep with something broken under their sternums and rise before it has learned to heal. always something to survive, just beyond the door, waiting with its little receipt of consequence. And still, they loved. What touches them reroutes to me My family is not the ruin. But ruin has worn our address often enough. I can’t stroll down a blurry path anymore. I was spliced from antenna wire and buried in soil that transmits. I feel the dirt composing its slow yes in a language my molars still recognize. My mother checks the locks twice. Why are the good plates stacked so high up that I can’t reach them? A hand hovering over the thermostat. A glance toward the ceiling when the pipes begin knocking. The details of cutting a cake: how many pieces can be made? Is it enough? I have been drafting a note that says I'll be gone by morning light— the way a match means it before it's struck, an ordinary morning, happiness laid out on the table and my first instinct being to scour below it find the invoice before the gift. I’m cosplaying as a human, moving through the bright machinery of an ordinary life, a low electrical inheritance traveling upward through root and tooth. I have spent too long expecting the ceiling to cave in. A little girl practicing her own signature in glitter pen the letters wandering enormous across the page, each one wearing enough pink to be seen from space. She presses harder on the downstrokes. The paper buckles beneath her name. Nobody tells her yet that some names arrive with furniture already inside them, certain syllables have been worn smooth by mouths that needed them for other reasons. She only knows how beautiful it looks when the whole thing fits on one line. I'm watching her from the doorway. Doing my own math: how many years. Though the numbers keep arriving already underlined. buckling is the point. When I sign my name into someone else's, I will not be losing anything. I will be filing paperwork on a house that was condemned before I was born, returning a set of keys nobody remembers cutting, letting someone else argue with the foundation. I'll be gone by morning light Let the old keep the ledger, the debts, the address ruin already learned by heart. I will keep the hands. I will keep the tenderness and what they knew to do with them. Everything else, I am striking from the record.

How did I end up with a gun in my hand? Did I carve it from the bones of surrender, sand down every prayer until it resembled a trigger, or did the world press it into my palm, cold and irrevocable as prophecy? I can’t recall which was first: the wound or the instinct to bleed before being cut. To train a body to recoil before joy has the chance to arrive is the oldest violence I know. to make the nerves into sentries, to teach the spine to bow toward catastrophe, to convince the heart that every unopened door is a more elegant mouth for ruin. Soon enough, expecting less feels reasonable. Ceilings creak with arthritic patience. Hallways learn your gait like a bruise being taught to speak. Doorknobs remember exactly how tightly to turn. Even wallpaper separates at the seams before you do. By then, survival has the odor of inheritance, of something passed hand to hand without benediction. Are you a captive of preordained illusions? Or do you tear at the veil, split open the seam of what is, until only what ought to have been remains, thin as a moth’s confession, bright with the terror of its own undoing? Maybe fate is nothing more than repetition performed with such fidelity it begins to wear the face of law. Possibly free will is the moment someone finally stops calling the wound a map and asks, with both hands emptied of prayer, whose fingerprints were already on the gun.

How sun-shower of me To be weeping in the bright as bright bites what’s left of wholeness, call it role maybe soul even control Sunny, it stays, with a chance of me. I am a treadmill of a girl legs lit up like a marquee, going nowhere in high definition steadily flickering beyond recognition. The rubber belt whirs in a synchronized scream, a furious sprint through a digitized dream. The odometer counts what the soles cannot keep, while I mimic the terror of running in sleep. The current drops heavy, a circuit-board dread, spinning the system while I rot in my head. A stationary flight through the silt and clay, the gears in my knees match the pressure of stone, an engine idling deep in the bone. The faster I press, the further I plummet where velocity learns to behave like weight. The pace is a trap and the hunger is deep, and the pavement just rises, more brutal and steep. You can tear up the canvas and rupture the heel, but you can’t outmaneuver the spin of the wheel. The white ribbon curdles; the intake goes dry The belt turns without me. I used to run to outrun it, now I just cry. My ribs are the rafters; my pulse is the floor. Why guard a perimeter that isn’t yours anymore? Let the dampness dissolve the enamel and spine the porch is a carcass of copper and brine. The lungs are an engine choking on its own smoke, realizing the distance was only a joke. The skeleton stands as a fixed monument to all the horsepower uselessly spent. It’s all just weather moving through a body, just weather, and I’m in the house it passes through.

Sweet Miss Cholia, what do you see? How long have you been here, waiting for me? I find you where the cedar sobbed its bitter resin, drop by drop. the branches neither bowed nor stirred they simply never thought to stop You favor lintels left askew, where varnish puckered into rue; you thumbed each warped and wavering stave as though it retained what no one gave. Pockets harbored ledger-dust, misfiled receipts, gilt crust; the forfeiture of orchard yield, a survey pin beneath the field. You measure not what disappeared, but every fraction persevered: the tincture clinging to the glass, the imprint after signets pass. At last I dare to follow close, expecting thread. Yet instead, you sink a thumb of oxide-red into the mortar’s crumbling bed. Pulling no guideline from your hand, nor offer reasons why we stand. Tend the quiet soot that gathers at the chimney’s foot, and hoard the usury of things delayed the interest on a debt unpaid. You pinch the nerve of what is past to make the temporary last: a deliberate, wintering art— through the iron valve that slows the heart. Sweet Miss Cholia, I see what you see, nothing is gone. it repeats within me.

Tracing outlines of lips I will never know, the shadow of embrace threads through my nervous system, and I am aware that even the act of leaning is a theft, stealing warmth from someone who does not deserve to stumble into my gravity. A hand reaches toward me, and ever-so-slightly comes into contact with the tip of my index the kind of hand that would linger without complaint, and I withdraw myself, because to invite it is to write a poem in fire across someone’s life that they never asked to read. I walk in the curve of absence, to bend toward it without breaking, to greet what cannot stay with a reverence that is almost prayer, because even reverence will not forgive the body’s insistence on taking inventory. I pine for a hand that does not recoil, but it is always behind glass, because I must let it know where it belongs Over there, away, and not here not near my skin. I have a habit of noticing how shadows settle into the cracks of someone else’s skin, and I count the moments until they vanish, because I know the way intimacy creeps in unnoticed, and I have no room for intruders. I represent the witness to my own absence, the afterimage of a life erased mid‑pulse, still insisting it once existed watching the future turn its face away in real time holding the shape of a life my body has already vetoed never to arrive.

My soul is severed fabric, torn—caught on the immovable, threads still reaching for what has already gone. There is a version of me permanently seated at thirteen, knees pulled in, waiting for you to walk in with certainty that everything unbearable could still be handled. In the pause after something good happens my mouth already forming your name before I remember there is nowhere to send it. In the instinct to stand a little straighter when I make a decision, as if you are still somewhere in the doorway watching without announcing it. I wish you were here to comfort me like you used to. No one ever does it like you do. Though you are the root of all my suffering That is the price I pay for eternally loving you. I am almost your age and the candles I light each year lean toward one side, Nineteen hangs off me wrong, a coat taken from your shoulders still warm at the collar, sleeves swallowing my hands whole. I keep gathering what broke, pressing the pieces together with hands that tremble, though one fragment refuses its place, lifting—light, disobedient slipping past the reach of my fingers before I can close around it. It thins as it rises until there is nothing left to hold but the space it occupied, and I sit with it that absence shaped exactly like something I knew feeling the rest of it soften, edges giving way, structure turning unreliable beneath my grip. The hours do not stay where I set them. They over-ripen and collapse inward, what remains stains everything it touches, leaving my hands empty, and waiting for something to return that has already learned how not to. Still, I reach into air long enough to place you where you were and keep you there. I cannot ask you questions twice or wait for answers I was never old enough to remember or possibly never meant to know. Because I cannot keep every part of you from time, I hold what time has not been able to take. So, throughout the years I add on Yet you can never be replaced For I know that I will everlastingly ache But every now and then Your presence reminds me That I’ll see you again.

Death has arrived knuckles grazing the glass windows, it has all the time we do not. Don’t answer when it taps. Don’t answer. It’s knocking persists again again a metronome stitched to dread, measuring the distance between breath and surrender. Do you hear it? that clinging insistence, like grief taught manners— like something that once loved you, but has since forgotten how. Don’t answer! no, do not dignify it with motion for doors are confessions, and hinges betray what the heart has attempted to barricade. It waits oh, it waits with a scholar’s devotion, cataloguing silence, finding scripture in the pause between each refusal. And I shrink into the marrow of the room, counting each second as a mercy that might yet rescind itself. I feel something within me stir, A buried fragment already gone to greet it. You didn’t listen. You stepped into it, despite my pleading and I kept believing distance was only a string in retreat, drawn taut enough to lead you to me. Death will not break It persuades. It remembers. And God— how it remembers us.

Excuse me, have you seen my joy anywhere? I misplaced it on a Sunday, I believe. Or possibly years ago beside a vending machine while fumbling for exact change and adulthood simultaneously. It was small enough to lose easily: warm as a library lamp, slightly sticky from apple juice or sweet tea, prone to wandering. If found, please return to Jubilation Station, platform two and a half, between the woman selling carnations from a paper bucket and the boy attempting to teach a pigeon tax evasion. At Jubilation Station, the clocks run on unreliable sentiment. The ticket booth accepts: three kind words, one unreasonable hope, or a button rescued from the bottom of a winter coat. No exact fare required. A woman in enormous green rain boots feeds blueberries to sparrows. Someone else plays accordion badly but with tremendous sincerity. Even the pigeons walk with the confidence of minor aristocrats. And at dusk the entire station smells faintly of cinnamon and engine smoke, something lovely just being removed from the oven. You laugh, but stranger occupations exist. Some people become dentists Some become weather forecasters We become so occupied with being employable that we forget how to be astonished. when was the last time you climbed a staircase simply because it spiraled beautifully? I do not mean to sound foolish the world remains the world terrible things continue occurring with bureaucratic punctuality. But still someone chalks stars onto sidewalks while someone else is placing googly eyes onto parking meters for no reason except that existence occasionally benefits from absurd supervision. Perhaps joy is just the little conductor punching holes through our gloom one ticket at a time, whistling terribly, ushering us aboard anyway. “All passengers welcome.” Even the weary ones. Especially the weary ones.

I see the bees in November Huddled and intent Perfectly suited for the next swarm and discipline of survival The sweet work of keeping in my backyard as I fold recipes into pocket-sized codes: bread rising, lullabies, meetings with the future, Envelopes stamped with my name and the name of the child I might cradle, but the envelopes are porous ambitions seep through their paper skin like spilled tea stains, and the cradle remains an echoing swing at dusk where footsteps do not come to rest. A conveyor belt carries grants, marriages, breakthroughs, while I argue with my legs about whether tomorrow is negotiable. There are shelves in my mind stacked with unwritten citations, titles I rehearsed the way other girls practiced signatures, each one a doorway I memorized by touch, but the keys keep slipping into the drain of my bloodstream vanishing with that small, humiliating sound of something lost without ceremony. I’ll map my life in blue ink and wake to find the ink gone, evaporated into the mattress But sometimes possibility appears like a fruiting tree across a river I once thought shallow. I envy the bees their lives measured before they begin. No surplus nor deviation. They spend themselves cell by cell, flying straight into the math of an ending And yet, they diligently advance towards it without pause or rehearsal. If the ideal comes, it will not arrive intact. It will come limping, missing pieces reassembled from spare hours and stolen steadiness, stitched together with a discipline I never wanted to learn. And if it does not come— then this body, unruly and incandescent, will remain the most rigorous thing I have ever studied. At least, at the end of the day, I’ll be able to watch the bees cluster in November. staying, holding, and humming as the season closes in.