Riddle
- Riddle
I’m the one who pumps all dayall night to let you live.All I get in return is broken.
This one from Scott, grade nine, on the day the kids say they like me, write hard as I roam their aisles in Crete the spring after the year I had cancer, two years after my body emptied.
This from life, the body blow the medicine ball lets swing from the rafters in the gym and you in the way, the thump and thud as your blood rushes to cover up, the kids in attendance as the bruise begins to color.
Outside hail pummelling the car, my minotaur thudding against ribs bruised but holding, the flesh cage, against his rampages. And I drive like hell in the din.
Today I am eating again. Donuts in the lounge soothe my throat, enter my empty belly. Coffee. A plaque in italic on oak a creed about accepting. I’m trying. In my ninth grade year, the elastic band in my underpants stretched out—all seven pair, each day of the week an accident. I was thin. Who could love me again in a world so dangerous I was food? [End Page 107]
Now, each breath a gift, the soar in air of hawks on the highway searching for road kill some sure sign I’m present. This world is dangerous. I hurt in the teachers’ lounge where TV dribbles and the choral teacher warbles his vibrato in answer to the second grade aid, a soprano. Their voices braid in time to cover my hiccup.
Hilda Raz is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska who has published two collections of poetry, What is Good and The Bone Dish. She is the editor of Prairie Schooner and has published essays, poems, and reviews in Kenyon Review, North American Review, American Book Review, Women’s Review of Books, and The Confidence Woman: Twenty-Six Women Writers at Work.
Selected Works by Hilda Raz:
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• Weathering/boundaries/what is good
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• Riddle
