by Mary Caroll-Hackett
She’d been writing creation myths, inventing beginnings at the little desk with the blue ink scars shoved into the corner of her bedroom. Sometimes she stopped, and ate cereal or a carrot or a piece of toast with butter, standing in the middle of her kitchen, her eyes filled with stars exploding or spiders weaving or big gusts of hot breath from some faceless deity whipping soil into souls. Sliding in her striped socks across her battered wooden floors, she conjured up chaos and danced in its midst, surrounded by great green fish and serpents of all colors, and shepherds who held tightly to sharp, shining daggers. Turtles swam, diving deeply then rising, and spiders wove great gossamer webs, weaving worlds into being, and Raven, with the sun clutched like a pearl in his beak. She especially loved the earth divers, those fearless first-footers—the beaver, the otter, the duck, the turtle holding us all on her back—in their oceans of water and darkness and sky and milk, all making the way, the world, for us. She jumped on her bed, the thin mattress a layer of heaven beneath her feet, springs squeaking and squealing, and imagined the freedom of that fall, when the tree roots pulled loose, when the stars slid away, when the skies burst open, and she dove into nothing, into everything, into what all could be. Landing with a thud, she felt the earth ripple up through her bones, her ribs like a cage catching it all, and gravity pinning her there to the floor. She wanted more. Oh she wanted so much more.
Mary Carroll-Hackett is the author of eight collections of poetry: The Real Politics of Lipstick, Animal Soul, If We Could Know Our Bones, The Night I Heard Everything, Trailer Park Oracle, A Little Blood, A Little Rain, Death for Beginners, and (Un)Hinged. Mary founded and directs the Creative Writing program at Longwood University and teaches with the low-residency MFA faculty at West Virginia Wesleyan. She is at work on a new collection of prose poems.
