Rebecca Anderson

Disavowal

after Maggie Nelson’s Bluets

This has been the summer of rocks that sit heavy in my chest & sneak up behind my eyes.
These things are heavy: Love as rocks, heartbreak as the same rocks.
I cup them in my hands & feel my fingers tingle. I tell myself not to hurl them.
I ask myself why these rocks exist & why we can’t fossilize joy.

Agency is not made from rock. It is a colander and a slotted spoon, slippery metal.
I tell myself my hands are too small to serve as adequate vessels for agency.
Agency is liquid. I try to scoop it from the ground; it's grainy, filthy, once it falls on fallow soil.
Agency is murky gray, laced with pity and discardable contempt, muted shades of denial I'd
rather wash down the drain than run through sieve after sieve.

Truth will slip through my fingers in a liquid rush while I cup my hands & blame myself for my
small palms & clumsiness.
The ground is wet; I cannot move my feet. I’ve been here so long.
The sunken cost fallacy is quicksand. Stand & freeze & drown in sand & agency & truth, in
particulates of ground-up love & heartbreak.

“Disavowal, says the silence.”

These are the rocks I have carried in my knees since I was born woman.
You are not the rocks I have carried. You just mirror their shape in the desert sun.

Rebecca Anderson is a writer, visual artist, and mental health clinician who works and writes from a small farm in central Maine. She is an MFA candidate at Mississippi University for Women's low-residency creative writing program where she is a poetry editor for Ponder Review. She was nominated for Best American Short Stories 2019 and has had recent work featured in Waxing & Waning, Passengers Journal, Bacopa Literary Review, and Jokes Review. Instagram: @rebeccatellsstories