1
Arrhythmia

Hard to hold the handlebars upright for my son in the flat ditch-side of the apartment building and run a little sidelong the embankment, hunch around him half-hug, barking cough not meaning its rough, gasp-grasping, pedal, push, steady. Inside my shirt a secret tweak jerking where the medical tape gums my sternum, rain-pocked ditch, sticky black lint crossing my heart hoping not to die. A promise is not the truth, only a promise to it. My son’s big for his age small for his brave and I’m hiding from him how scared I am. Pedal, feel yourself, steady. A new bike from an old husband would not teach a son to ride. His gift money-metal-special, a half giving. Mine always muscle half giving out. It must be whole enough. My son will learn to ride this bike, work the phone microwave can-opener deadbolt, feelings, he’s almost there. End of the ditch the grass rags to goose shit, glass, rip-rap and back I must turn his full weight in a space too tight and my heart bulges, a frog freeing itself from a fist. Find the rhythm. I need you to learn this balance. Pedal, push, steady. Promise you’ll keep going when I let go.


2
Nightfall

Mom breaks her other hip. Lungs hold clots like berries in an apron, and nurses dig for dehydrated veins. It’s never the same nurse, never the same vein. My four brothers come, a procession of town criers clanging through fog, tiny bells and candles lighting the kitchen through my phone. We’re waiting for a bed. We’re not getting answers. Their cries wing over the mountains a good eight hours in this weather. I shrink with indecision: to go or not to go, what is expected of an only daughter. My hips are her hips, I hurt where she hurts. They can’t find a vein. They can’t find an answer. Nightfall pools a deeper bruise. I stand in the kitchen gripping my phone like a lantern in the wilderness, and wait for a path to open before me. Every time I ever asked Mom how she was doing she’d sigh, “As well as can be expected.” And I’ve never known what was expected. I’ve never known how to find the way back to her.


3
Arctic Hares

We return each morning to the page my son tastes the snowmelt. Because it is winter in this hemisphere, the hare is white with black ear-tips. It sits imaginary, real on his lap. Its fur remains summer-brown beneath snow. He rubs thumb against forefinger to test the invisible velvet. There, we see another hare loping over the page, its snowshoe toes splaying a message of passage. Come find me, it reads. Find me where the tracks end. My son chases the hares over the international dateline. I confuse myself trying to explain. Once you go into tomorrow, today becomes yesterday. We’re already living in the past, even as we see the future before us. Greenland—he wants to visit. Russia, too, and the pole at the top. I can’t tell him why I look so sad. The hares wait. There is no true land at the top of the Earth, you see? Just as there are no lines or barber-poles whirling patriotic colors. It’s only the planet, which no one owns, and its magnetic core, which many animals feel sure as the seasons. No, I don’t know why we can’t. There’s so much to know. The world is changing. Someday the ice will melt. Someday the pole will magnetize from open sea. I don’t know if we’ll feel it then, maybe it will happen in his lifetime. Maybe he’ll live to have his questions answered. He stops caressing the invisible fur, narrows his eyes to scan the dateline for the future. If it gets too hot, will the hares not turn white? Will the hares remain brown all year-round? Will the hares remain? Will we?