an excerpt from “The Mayflies”
One afternoon on the first day of winter, I walked out the door. It was spring, I called out to someone. My ladies came running. It was the hottest day on record and I was on the street. I was crossing over.
The bridge traffic was stopped. Red light, green light, winter light, silence. I returned to my vortex, reverent. I was situated on the riverbank, looking at my wristwatch. It felt useful to keep track. My ladies were there, covered in whispers. I could hear bits of conversation: But I thought you knew…
I was pitched forward by a sudden crash, and it was there, on the edge of a gentle submersion, that my mind gave way. It was simple. I looked out over to the other side of the river and was drained of the future.
The river churned its mud below the blue bridge. I was down. It wasn’t the motion of flight. There was nothing to get away from. I was there, at the riverbank. I placed my hands in the river.
–Sara Veglahn
Sara Veglahn is the author of Another Random Heart (Letter Machine, 2009), Closed Histories (Noemi Press, 2008), That We Come to a Consensus—a collaboration with the poet Noah Eli Gordon (Ugly Duckling, 2005), and Falling Forward (Braincase, 2003). Her fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals, including: Conjunctions, Fence, Tarpaulin Sky, Trickhouse, and Bombay Gin. She served as the poetry editor for Art New England and as the associate editor for the Denver Quarterly, and has taught writing and literature courses at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Denver, and Naropa University.
You can find more of her work here:
