Jenny Irish

In Texas There are Tours of Things That Aren’t There Anymore

Ten years from now I will think of Texas as the end of girlhood. Hot nights on the thin ledge of the edge of sleep, listening past the quiet to the cockroaches scaling the slick insides of a plastic bag of dinner’s discarded odds and ends—the last sweetness in the tiny sauce cup, the salted peel of a potato pursed like a mouth, the final, taffy-yellow bite of brisket-fat spat into a paper napkin, and then the train whistle, punching through, and I am upright, a hard-beating heart, and on the bedside table the cheap plastic fan at the furthest point of its rotation sticks, clicks, and clicks and clicks unable to reverse its course. A shift of the curtains, a spill of dishwater light: good morning.

One hundred years ago, on the spring-fed river boiling cold from the rocks, a silent film star sent to the country to be cured of an unnamed affliction fled the vast, verandaed hospital—a gray carcass now on a hill watercolored by wild flowers—and didn’t drown, though he dove down and down again, trying in a psychosis of withdrawal to swim through the split where the water roared up.

In the closer past, on the same river, but further down, after the slow flowing tannic stretch, dark as over-steeped tea, where the snouted softshell turtles rise through the red like a quiet corps of color-muted military hot air balloons, I didn’t drown.

Caught in a current surge, I submerged, scuffing over river rock, skin stripped back—my chin, my shins, my shoulders, my knuckles, my knees, all singing in a carrying high-note of hurt. When I was beyond breathless, black bursts of tar-bubble-light and raw fingertips reaching nothing, the river calmed again, widening, dropping down into shallow yellow acres of puddle-water. All the young mothers, the straps of their bathing suits pushed from their shoulders so as not to interrupt their tans, laid out on the smooth rock rim, their babies splashing naked.

Once, on the river, there was a concrete coliseum with a cold, spring-fed pool at its center: The Aquarena, where busty girls with pin curls set with Gum of Benjamin who could hold their breath for long minutes showed their athletic ability by performing synchronized tricks with a twitch-snouted series of pink piglets all called Ralphie. Visit The Aquarena! Home of Ralphie, The World Famous Swimming Pig!

This began as a love poem and still is.

Literary scholars of certain training and temperament will argue importance indicated by absence. That which never appears, still, they would say, overlaps every shadow and tickles each fine, premonitory hair at the back of every neck.

There are the ready phrases for the pain that accompanies love: swallowed stones, lodged fish bones, homesickness, sitting home alone.

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Jenny Irish lives in Tempe, Arizona. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Catapult, Colorado Review, Epoch, The Georgia Review and Ploughshares. She is the author of two collections: Common Ancestor and I am Faithful.