OLIVIA BRASH

A Shabbos Prayer for Kathy Acker

She is a slow mover and walker, a Rubicon Jeep. Something like one of those monster pickup trucks, with the huge tires, and never anything in their truck beds. The season is changing so it is time to let the garlic sleep under the ground. Garlic, rosemary, fennel. White vervain. These are the plants with which I adorn myself. Those hands which light our purple candle, its two wicks, with the blessing, with a red plastic lighter. With my family a match is used. Holding the bird in my lap, his hands unsteady and his legs wriggling like two slender fishes. My head underwater. My whole life in weather. Reading I say the words in my head so they fill it up, each one a word-shaped bubble. Rosemary, salt. Pouring water with a pitcher onto each of my hands. Water from an orange cooler into a paper cup onto my hands. Leaned my head out the window until I was folded around its corner at the waist. Green journal. A black journal. A red one, left overnight in my tent, leather cover bent up. Folding my left arm around it to hide the things I’m writing about everyone else in the room. Silence at the candles, the dinner we made at the center of the table. A movement, dancing. Contact is dancing, I know that but I forget it sometimes. Down the center of the road with the sun setting over the cow pasture. In Warner and sun is coming through the window in a square on the floor which is watery. The movement a prayer. To put it in my language. The la’s and the clicks of tongues. Body on body, I wandered over and folded myself against the far wall, in a triangle of darkness in the corner. I watched the dancing and I laughed and laughed. Ending my body folded around Annika’s body, my head in the reflective space between her neck and her shoulder. The quietness of a big building and the humming under it. I sat on my bed and listened and noted the way the guitars pan across the mix and how the reverb is subtly changed on the second chorus. I am learning to hear production in the underneaths of sounds. Asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav, v’zivanu l’hadik ner... The big underlands, the networks of storm drains, drainage tiles, sewer pipes under the ground. My whole self held in the wet dirt of the earth. Dirt was up my arms and crawling on the sides of my face. Alive with compost, with decay and with breath. A mushroom grows in the center of the log. The song Lili and I were singing in our beds at night, like summer camp. She is someone that I do not know yet. She is someone who will hold all the parts of my life in one glance. She is someone I will fold my skin around like a new suit. And she will not be separate from me. He will not be either. Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech haolam... A prayer is a long road with soybeans growing on either side. The road is made of gravel. I felt Annabel’s shoulder blade kiss on my back. Say I’m grateful for you every time and hold both of your hands. The chocolate chips I left in that bed and Emma was making jokes that I pooped my pants. The same song over and over, this life which I hand over. The plane was humming and I tried so hard to see people on those empty streets from up above. Two wolves frozen in movement. Nonmovement. If we could see the northern lights from here I would hold them while we all watched. The cat takes up the whole of my two arms. I drove the car with my mother until we started to scream at each other and I had to stop and get out. I didn’t do anything wrong though. A water cup full on the table. The dishes done and the sink is empty. We watched the sun set all in one place and in it the whole time and in the twilight their dances looked like the night moving. Waded out into shallow water. Jumped in so fast and shivered all the way back up to the car. Red clover for tea. Dried fennel and herbs over the kitchen. I mixed the flakes of butter into the batter with my hands. Eliana’s eyes got all bugged out whenever she really started to dance. Rocks her body back and forth like a big hand is holding it and shaking it back and forth. Marriage— what do we think about that, anyway? Quietness and a library computer. A book returns when it is raining. Contact with a body I do not know on a gray day and the huffing, the snurfling like two big dogs, the laughs. And thank you for dancing with me. I was a writer in the swamp, the peat up to my legs. I was harvesting mushrooms and Queen Anne’s lace with pink scissors. I chopped the clean stems. I listened to the sound coming through the wind. And he was saying, You idiot. Life has handed you this purple car and you must drive it.

Olivia Brash is a writer and audio engineer living in Chicago. They studied at Oberlin College.