Life as we know it by Rachel Mindell | Really System: Issue Fifteen

Life as we know it

Rachel Mindell

It could have been above 100 degrees but it was certainly summer.

Although most planets we can see do not appear blue-green as ours does,
we know now that many harbor water.

My father was running in the river bed, either bare chested
or wearing a grey t-shirt purchased on sale.

His older brother was in Los Angeles. He either owned horses
or bet on horses or bet on horses that he owned.

My father was experiencing a sense of the toughness money can’t buy. Horses
either. It was so intense his head began to fill with light. It surged.

Water does not have to be liquid to be water
but that is the kind we tend to recognize fastest and name as such.

There was a four year old girl and a mother who was a nurse and a kitten recovered
from the roadside. They were at home or they were out when the call came.

Although it may not be possible to see below a frozen surface
with the mere human eye, cracks on a celestial body are indicative. Mounds also.
Hint of eruptions long ago can be detected by machine.

My mother says after the stroke he was not the same. She says the same
of the car accident. One day, something in the brain or something missing.

We understand that oceans aren’t unique to our planet. That flash floods
and monsoon aren’t why the desert.

I either stole the money soon after or years after these events.

At night, we listen for the march of rain. We hear the lightening or it is silent.

I took 5 or I took 6 $20 bills from his wallet. He had cash
for the track and from the track. He did not use a bank.

Blue/green is not alone on the spectrum. Ice is also flowing
though it’s motion is difficult to detect.

You will be pretty, he would say.

The fact of a moon indicating a planet. A moon full
of deep water indicating water on the planet, or the magnetic fields
influencing water’s presence on either body.

You will be pretty, as though in being pretty I could cease
to be a thief, cease to be water, moon.

Rachel Mindell Rachel Mindell is writer and teacher from Tucson, Arizona. Her chapbook, A Teardrop and a Bullet, was released last year by Dancing Girl Press. Individual poems have appeared in Pool, DIAGRAM, Bombay Gin, BOAAT, and elsewhere. She works for Submittable. A nascent Twitter account lives here: @rachel_mindell.

ISSUE FIFTEEN: Lastly, My Seer | next poem →