Mitchell Untch
EVOLUTION
I.
I’m rooted to this chair, reading this book,
facing my reflection in the window where I
see you, still, waiting for me to enter, your
hand, the yellow curtain pulled to one side,
just two rooms, no mirrors.
It’s four in the morning.
I want to touch you so you know
I know you’re still alive.
When you disappear you forget everything, become
a flower, a field, wind, a heat blazing forever,
a paved road, a stop sign, a scrap of an exchange,
a lost word, a photograph, a slap on the wrist,
a broken chime, that child under the table tying
his shoelaces.
Don’t blame my hands, my mouth. They’re
waiting for the flip of a switch, bright, bright
as a kitchen.
I found an abalone shell, ran my finger
over the broken edge and thought of my
older brother, the war, his leg shot off, hemorrhaging
like an ocean. I was seven years old when
he took me to the beach and nearly let me drive
into the water, the birds flying over us,
loud as helicopters.
Stars. Exhibitionists.
I heard him whistling last night, looking up at
stars as if he’d just seen a gallery of faces--brothers,
aunts, uncles, nieces, wives that watch him sweep floors,
empty trashcans, scrub toilets, fold dinner napkins,
close curtains, the curtains that keep sunlight from entering
the church at night, balancing the moon on the tip of his tongue.
I’m alone. I hear a boy laugh, see him point his
finger,
a book, pages falling, falling.
How beautiful my mother is: Why would
she do this to me? I loved her so much that day
because I knew I would hate her for life
that I would always hear her pulling
out of the driveway and never, ever coming
back.
Not the same way. Not the same way.
The lawnmower torturing the grass,
the sprinkler caressing it.
I hear her walking, spreading the carpet
thin, opening the door to my bedroom,
kicking it closed. Then autumn:
leaves shuddering, the ground taking them
in, footprints everywhere. Why do you
hate me?
What makes a childhood a death
the buried body of a song?
Did I mention the photograph, the guy to the
right of those three who was her Harry,
the one who died. Oh sweet small
orchard of pears, apples spinning,
browning through the years, smiling,
full of seed, dust around the corners
of their mouths where there was a shade
of red once, the aftertaste of rain.
As deep as any memory —
the flowing, the river, that sort of paradise
that wind carries, that windows
open to, and doors cut from a tree in that
same paradise, affirming, confessing.
Dip your feet into the ocean, now blue, now
green, now sapphire.
II.
He leaned into her. She kissed him on the
forehead.
See how light is breaks branches.
See how the stars give way.
Sometimes I wonder what it would feel like
to walk upside down and what a postman
might look like delivering mail, letters-
birds of our own making.
I feel the sky, hear my mother whisper.
A grasshopper sputters.
These hours of loneliness.
The Romans wrote of seasons then captured
them in stone, nothing but living then,
and planning one’s survival.
And then they burned their city down.
The way a mother carries her child
after a long day, how her body bends,
the wind stirring.
I want to be something
I swore I would never forget,
that boy in the field by Winslow.
He takes me to where I’m going
I smell her hair.
I still smell her hair.
I ripped her letter to shreds.
And I think who cares as I look up the road at that new
batch of roses flooding the air, roots
crawling over bones.
I am a beginner in this world.
Mitchell Untch is an emerging writer. He was named as a finalist for the Telluride Institute Fischer Prize in 2022, The Journal: Wheeler Prize for Poetry in 2018, Crab Orchard Review Book Contest in 2017, and twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.