Shawna says she’s always looking for a person’s single lowest moment, and you thought to mention your husband is in love with another woman, but not that, how you’d managed to think about anything else until months later, when your screensaver showed mountains you’d seen. Were they real? Or when YouTube asked you to choose between commercials for tax season or Direct TV, but you were stuck on that screensaver. Or when Shawna says she’s always looking for a person’s single lowest moment, and you thought to mention your husband is in love with another woman.
Pines blooming, transcendent. An autonomy, a monotony of early spring. Peaks purpled with enough light left for you to mistake the sky’s intentions. Clouds twisted above, sped faster. Down where dead yellow leaves hung this long, just for the maple to upstage itself with tiny orange buds. You wanted to take it all in, unhesitating, how little you cared if needles piled on.
It is possible you are still in that moment with Shawna, you will always be in that moment: bitter wind, the marsh grass shakes its head at the lake, still frozen, the street you lived on, the years you lived there. You wonder now if the mountains could prevent you from experiencing reality, just as the screensaver did, just as that city with the frozen lake you’d never forgive.
Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is the author of Dybbuk Americana (Wesleyan University Press, 2024) and The Art of Bagging (Conduit Press & Ephemera, 2023). He received his PhD and MFA in Poetry from the University of Houston, where he also served as a Poetry Editor and Digital Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast. From 2018-2019 he served as an inaugural Post-Harvey Think Tank Fellow at Rice University’s Humanities Research Center, representing folklore. He teaches at San Jacinto College, and lives in Houston with his wife and son.