by Jude Brigley
An Adoptee’s Attempt at Autobiography
Smoke is only the echo of an elegy. The canyon: a glance before the blink. // An image only holds so much and we call it enough, in want of beauty. To tell /// the story of wild beasts, or rather, the portrait tumbling in desert air. She leaves / the matchbox behind, closed and untouched. The dead moth’s body left inside, // remembered as the slicing of light, then shadowed just as fast. Last year: a river /// whose name rushes into extinction. Another past crafted from closed mouths. / To the river, I am no more than carbon print left unswallowed. Does anyone care // about names anymore? I want to tell you I was not that child, but can’t. And I am /// not the portrait, but I would like to be the grinded paint, or brush, or artist’s hand.
Can you hear me?
I meant to start the story here: me, alone again in the garden. The charred match // remains still in my palm like another wounded animal I cannot heal. Unless /// a wound is only the mark of someone never loved enough. I avoid rivers now. / I can only stare at it—the match, I mean, saying nothing. I can imagine it all, though: // the child’s voice after she buried the chrysanthemum and the crabgrass, both dead, /// side by side. She buried them and traced the epitaph in the dirt with her finger, / then crossed it out and let the pyre bloom into itself and out of the hush. Nobody // knows what she wrote. She says she forgot. No. I’m sorry, I started this wrong /// again. I meant to start the story here, with the rocking horse and happy ending.
Can you hear me?
Rachael Lin Wheeler is currently a student attending Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. Her writing and photography have been recognized by Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and her poetry appears in various publications. Serving as the editorial assistant for EX/POST MAGAZINE, Rachael Lin is also the founder and editor of Vox Viola Literary Magazine—an intersectional feminist publication—which can be found at https://voxviola.com. She is prone to 2 am laundry folding.
Jude Brigley is Welsh. She has been a teacher, a an editor and a performance poet. She now writes more for the page. Over the last three years she has tried to walk her area every day and document this with a photograph. Her photographs have appeared in various magazines.