I. WAYS IN WHICH SHE IS AN AVALANCHE
Take care to pay attention to what is frozen on the inside.
Take care to pay attention to when it is melting.
Let’s talk about the ice queen.
Let’s talk about growing up in the snow.
The girl grown to woman in a colder landscape, a landscape covered in white, in ice, the gray afternoon she was pulled in a pink sled down the hill, the sled her mother was pulling, the sled that flipped over, the shock of her bare face hitting the sharp cold of the snow. It was almost warm. It pricked. She prickled. She could picture her cheeks: rosy. And her mother stood laughing because her reaction to the shock of the cold must have been funny, her mother stood laughing as her poor face froze.
Picture the top bunk close to the sagging ceiling. Picture the apartment with no living room furniture, only a table in the corner and a bare carpeted floor. She used to sleep covered in quilts, no heat in the room, no heat anywhere in the house except from the fake fireplace, except the unbearable space heater in the bathroom, where even the hot water in the shower ran cold after only a couple of minutes and she would shiver, naked before the frosted window—what did she look like, was her face red, would she have been any warmer if she had crawled into the snow?
She didn’t know, so when she grew older, when she lived on her own, she did not want to pay for heat in the winter, stupidly letting her apartment get down to sixty, and then fifty, degrees. She never left the cabinet doors open—so what if the pipes could freeze? She slept in a cold bed upon a cold pillow, she wore a scarf and fingerless gloves and the thought of the cloth strangling her in her sleep didn’t scare her, only the thought of leaving the space heater on for too long, forgetting to turn it off after she closed her eyes, she was not afraid of turning to ice she was only afraid of not waking up before she burned.
She watched the snow falling from her window.
She watched it cover the top of her car and the sidewalk and the street watched
as it came down in pockets, filling like ashes
like the crescent-moons of her fingernails she was (is) always scattering about.
And she put the water on to boil.
And she put on another blanket.
And she buried herself (she called it survival) and she did not let go.
II. WAYS IN WHICH SHE IS A TORNADO
is it only because she spins?
When she’s dancing sometimes she closes her eyes and loses herself to the sound and the motion the feeling of her hair as it whips around her head, as it tickles her neck. Sometimes she is the only one when she is dancing, not dancing alone but dancing by herself, oblivious to those around her, the bodies in motion, the bodies responding to the sound, she is dancing within her own funnel of movement, the paths she creates across the floor chaotic and unpredictable, she forces everyone else to be aware of her, to get out of her way. Watch. It is possible she will close her eyes and spin with abandon and straight into you. Warning. She is moving, a certainty, she is coming.
I cannot sit still for too many minutes
(except for the days when I cannot move).
I cannot remember some mornings what it feels like to dance, cannot remember the movement of muscles cannot fathom the journey across the room when I become frozen when I am the stillness when I am preparing for the storm to come.
Does a woman move differently if she was a girl in the Midwest?
The rustle of tall grass and knowledge of a prairie, the familiarity with flatness, with heavy air that can turn at any moment, clouds that can go black and angry in an afternoon, the stillness that promises wreckage—these are the conditions under which she grew arms and legs and hair and teeth and tits and fingernails. Her heart began beating in a part of the world that wrestles the wind, and the wind decides when it’s time to come out to play, the wind moves on its own terms, the wind pulls the clouds into its rage and restlessness and need to move faster and larger and in a way that destroys and terrifies and reminds.
The wind wins.
And all is silent.
Except my mind.
Which keeps talking and talking though my body remains silent
(and still)
and I am no longer the tall grass I am no longer the flat earth, I am no longer the dancer, I am only the wind. Waiting. (I am only the wind.)
She spins, oh, she spins.
III. WAYS IN WHICH SHE IS A WILDFIRE
The burning ember the spark that falls upon dry grass the smoke that rises and covers the earth and fills the sky and tears through the atmosphere. She is the flame that grows into another, into another until the forest has fallen beneath her the trees the ash she rubs across her forehead and between her breasts, this past, what was, nothing but remnants of fire, of that which has been burned, she puts the heat of it upon her tongue and lets it melt her throat. She is fire, she could breathe it if she would only exhale, she could take this fucking stretch of the landscape down she could end it. She will walk out the back door and slam it behind her. She will not bother to lock it. She will leave you inside, exposed and vulnerable, she will make you take care of yourself, her hands will freeze in the cold but she will warm them with matches will warm them with breath, the flames of all that could have been words if she hadn’t melted them into dust, she will leave you standing in a pool of gasoline and she won’t flinch she will never look back.
She’ll want to kiss a stranger to remember how it feels.
She could open her legs she could let them open, she could open them to let someone (come) inside.
She could be coming and she could be going she is going to rip holes in her tights she is going to shred them apart she is going to (come) she is going to lose her mind.
To remember how it feels.
And what, then, when she bursts into flames?
What then?
Just like the ashes from a cigarette she will fall down.
IV. WAYS IN WHICH SHE IS AN EARTHQUAKE
The plates are shifting. They are reaching toward one another beneath the ground. They are reaching, commingling, yearning; or they are pushing against, pushing into, slamming into, hitting, wanting to hurt.
And, oh, the things we do to each other when what we are wanting to do is hurt.
Plates thrown against walls shatter, they crack when they fall to the floor, when they slip from the table when they are pushed from it, the yellow plate her grandmother gave her when she moved into her first apartment, the yellow plate that she dropped with a slice of pizza on it, that she sent off the table as she crashed into another room, as she stormed into the darkness to where she couldn’t see, where she could not be seen, where she did not want to see anything and did not see the yellow plate she had loved as it was thrown into the trash, did not see the contents of the wineglass she had filled as they were poured down into the sink, she was in the darkness on the hardwood floor on the house’s foundation on the dirt on the dirt on the dirt burying somewhere deep below it those plates.
Smashing.
Look at them: pressing into each other hard.
Let’s talk about what it is we are wanting to do when all we are wanting to do is hurt. It hurts when the earth breaks in half, hurts when the gap is a threat of what anyone could fall into, a gap going down into what is unfathomable, down into the fires, the furnace that heats us my god it is so warm it is so goddamned hot it is sweltering and she is melting, look, she is melting: into the floor her wineglass is empty and she doesn’t know it yet and the sky is dark so she doesn’t see it she is only attached to the floor (to the foundation to the ground, down down down) and is not thinking of what would happen if it split.
Consider the plates as they press against each other, doing what they wish they could be doing, which, of course, is fucking. The plates have arms, don’t they? The plates have lips and teeth and some have cunts and some have cocks and they get wet sometimes, they get hard, they want to reach for each other, for these most seductive parts. Whatever they are reaching for, the point is they are reaching, extending, bumping, vibrating, overlapping
(they only want to love)
(they only want to fuck)
they only want to fucking love
these plates, these plates they are crashing, cracking and into the earth we all fall.
V. WAYS IN WHICH SHE IS A TIDAL WAVE
Just beyond some stillness there is the threat of sudden overflowing, water coming not as a relief but a roaring, an outpouring into a crash, a flood, the gradual (re)filling of every part.
The tide like the moon, like a woman, on a cycle—periodically she rises and she falls. The body of a woman a vessel; the body of the ocean an undulation; the shape a body of water curls into, roars into, breaks from; rising too high in a sudden onset of feeling, rising so high she must come crashing down, in a rush, this release her goodbye.
Goodbye to the houses goodbye to the trees goodbye to those left standing goodbye to the past and the roots and the dirt. She will fill all as she crashes, the holes and the alleys, and then she will fill some more, fill what is not meant to contain so much water, or any water, no more than a spill, no more than a puddle, because her body is swelling, she is dripping water from her pores it is falling from her fingertips it is soaking her hair, she is wet overflowing, she is roaring she is spilling she is careening toward the vessel, take it, take it all, all she can no longer hold. And the spaces she seeps into, the ground she soaks, the sky she mirrors—in vastness, in inescapability—the sky that she mirrors is holding its breath.
Heather Bartel is founder and co-editor of the literary journal and community, The Champagne Room. Her essay collection, Exit the Body, is forthcoming from Split/Lip Press in 2024. Her work can be found in MAYDAY, Fence, Heavy Feather Review, Grimoire, Miracle Monocle, Leavings, Birdcoat Quarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Columbia, MO.