Sixteen
by Michelle Menting
Only three days ago, I failed my driver’s test. With the instructor I drove down Duck Lake Road past the supper club to the marina to park parallel along shrink-wrapped yachts. Too late in the season for such storage—everything bundled, those boats in their casings, bulbous like bruises, bordering on rot. I should’ve punctured them, torn the blue plastic with the Honda’s grill. Instead, I didn’t pass—get my license, that is—because I drove too slowly. Hardly went above 20 miles per hour. In my mind, what failed to translate was the speed of things. How I wanted to careen down that road, to smash and scrape, to have it all become landslide. Listen: I know how it seems, as if all I do is the undoing of things. The humidity is so thick today. If I could, I’d sponge the air then wring out for drops to make you more comfortable. Your hospice bed—a metal cage in that same room where you always read to me, sang to me—I’d disassemble its bolts and wheels, its skeleton of rails and bars. Now, outside, your oldest daughter asks me, your youngest, about the raspberry brambles. How did they get torn apart? Why is there red stomped on the ground, smeared on the trunks along the garden’s path? We lean, she and I, against those trees, maples tapped last fall, and all I can do is shrug, let the bark scratch more skin. If I could—write quickly enough—mother, I’d read to you everything I did today.
MICHELLE MENTING is the author of the full-length poetry collection, Leaves Surface Like Skin (Terrapin Books), and two poetry chapbooks. Her poems, essays, and short stories can be found in Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, The Cimarron Review, The Offing, The Southeast Review, Midwestern Gothic, Harpur Palate, The Texas Observer, and DIAGRAM, among other places. A recipient of scholarships from Sewanee and Bread Loaf writers’ conferences, Michelle has been awarded for her written work with residencies from Hewnoaks Artist Colony, Crosshatch/Hill House, and the National Park Service, where she served as Poet-in-Residence on Isle Royale National Park, an International Biosphere Reserve.