Elizabeth Bradfield
Afterimage
—AFTER BARBARA COHEN, AFTER LESVOS
A mound of jackets. Ten acres, one article
says. Safety orange stuffed, zipped, buckled,
tied and then cast off, piled
on shore. Once, when I was small, maybe seven which means
my little sister would have been four— or maybe we were six
and three—either way, she was young enough for me to think
I should think for her. We were in a small boat coming home
from an island that we lived near and loved. Summer. Dark.
Choppy. Cold. I wasn’t frightened. Can
a memory deep in my body’s ignorant dark-
ness connect us? We
were small, but I felt big. My sister sometimes got sick in the
boat, then dove into a sleep that carried her elsewhere. She
and I faced the stern. Our parents, driving, looked ahead into
the dark water for danger: logs, mostly. A running light tailed
us like an obstinate star.
Did those boats have lights?
My sister’s head jounced against the musty orange of her Mae
West. Loud outboard. Loud thwacks of the hull. We steered
for home by shore lights we knew, route rote as a walk to the
neighborhood store. All
my knowledge of water
does not know their water.
I could see my sister was cold. Proud of noticing, I took some towels and knotted them around her legs and arms. She slept on. My mother turned—and this is it, I now see, not my memory but my memory of my mother—she turned and saw some story from the old myths looming up behind her: a log struck, her youngest flung out, bound, unable to kick against cold water and so drowned by her oldest. No matter, at that moment, what we moved from or toward. Only the sea’s indifference all around.
I will never forget the terror of her fury
such luck in what is left behind,
abandoned and untested.
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Toward Antarctica (Red Hen Press 2019). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Orion, and elsewhere. Her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship. Bradfield works as a naturalist, teaches at Brandeis University, and runs Broadsided. Learn more about her work at www.ebradfield.com.