Frankie Silver, flash nonfiction, inaugural issue, EQUINOX MAGAZINE

Above and Below

From Sykroniciti, Fall 2019

I left my marriage and went walking 

In a cemetery down by the sea.  I was

With another man.  I thought I saw my

Name on a tombstone but it was

An N, not a V.  The other letters

Were the same.

The night before, we’d climbed across

The console of the car, remembered

The wanting, like teenagers.

I asked him point blank—will we,

Shall we, go in the house?

Graveyards are different near the ocean.

Bones shrouded neath concrete filled

With shell.  Ivory monuments like paperweights

So the dead won’t float away.  Marble angels 

Crying, feathers of stone.

I left for good reason, and am fierce now.

I intend to lie down in the dark full of joy.  I will

Celebrate the run of the tide, the rhythm of

Shoes on the gravel path, the pressure of palms

Against my back.

Above and below.

Under each stone there is a body,

This we know.  Arms folded,

Babies and old women, clothes

Gone to paper tatters and finger bones

Laced in the rib cage.

Time blesses.  Things do

Blue together eventually—

The softened cover of burial dirt, the

Clouds watercolor white, inlet ripple.

Wind rustles the bamboo grove.

When my eyes close, my hips move.

A Prayer that I Will Love Oblivion

I have begun to think about it now,

though parents still sit like dolls in their same

1960s house and wars are in foreign languages—

And the way I see it is the way

they show the universe on television:

First the city, then the United States.

Next the world from the moon, and then

the solar system entire before the zoom 

out to the galaxy, which of course is only

a minor formation of stars on the edge of the Milky Way.

Of course, it is hard, the idea of oblivion.

I had aspirations, wanted

 to be of some significance, to

have curved space differently, perhaps,

because I wore this material form

and worked at life.

But if we believe the laws of science are real—

matter cannot be created or destroyed—

we know we were and shall be again

scattered like glitter, or perhaps used

as the dirt that grows the tree.

But will it be enough, to disappear this way,

To kiss the darkness or dissolve into the light,

and still Be?

For sure, oblivion will not be nothing.

Whatever it is, I intend to love it

once it becomes known.

Recommended Books for Aspiring Writers

• Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction, and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life, Bonnie Friedman

• The Writing Life, Annie Dillard

• Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

• The Book Thief, Marcus Zusak

• Life of Pi, Yann Martel