PERIGEE
BY MELISSA CUNDIEFF-PEXA
“All I remember is a gush of wind, and then the sound. Leo, who was standing next to me, wasn’t standing next to me. He was off to the side,”
–Mark McNitt reporting what he remembers after Adacia Chambers crashed her car into a crowd of people at Oklahoma State University’s Homecoming Parade on October 24, 2015, killing four and injuring forty-four.
Do you know that people died? As a child, I believed
a floating pinpoint of dust was so relative I cried
and kicked when it faded. Close as possible, my eye
must have seemed to the mote’s microscopic lives
like a blinking satellite reentering at night.
Do you understand what you’ve done? Her answer is not
a house but its doors. (The distance between
beginning and end is a formless, unpredictable matter.)
Do you understand what has happened? Her chest fills
with baths burning to white. A family dog sleeps
through the day, and the moon in a hungry haze opens
the fridge for some milk. The moon, the dog,
and the family who won’t come home tonight
huddle closer and closer in aperture like an exit wound.
Do you understand you hurt a lot of people? Her hand
is a bandaged bomb. A burst fist gripped by little dolls,
stuffed bears in chairs, the mutt in his rescuing kingdom.
Do you understand why you’re here? Her answer is not
a room but its walls blown down, the air-born rubble
elided with light and twinkling as though America
from space. If I move close enough now to the lit image
of my country in that arrested moment of orbit,
I see only its beginning and ending.
Do you understand what you’ve done? Her answer is not
a place but its entity trying to find a word for time
when dropped as though ink into that inevitable proximity.
