putting myself on: a study in creative ambiguity

She put on her raincoat and went north. “Going to see,” she said.

She had meant to say, “I’m leaving this dry-cracked earth, this red desert full of sun-scorched allegories, this perennial prison with prickly windows, the heat, you.”

She had meant to say that she no longer lived inside of herself and that she wanted to marry a birch tree instead, or a poem. But she didn’t. She had only thought about it.

She didn’t fill the locks or break up the ice trays. She meant to just after she tore down the yellow walls and painted them with sand to remind her of thirst. But she forgot.

Snowdrops don’t bloom here, she remembered as she lifted her head for the first time since she remembered. How long had it been now? A blazing noon? A suffocating century? One white enfolding? She had no way of knowing, only clocks kept time.

“This time,” she meant to say and turned away, burning.

She had meant to pull up the hot floor with her hands before she left, uproot the foundation, quake the heart, and heave the undone allocations into the sky. She thought for a moment it might look like rain. So she put on her raincoat and went north.