Hike to Chimaera

Ingredients for a bad time: one couple, mismatched. In love but asunder. In love and leave him in the cracks of the earth, the natural gas, the small flames so hard to see. That is your love, dying as it meets the air, that is the muggy night, the dark, moonlit walk, sip of water from a stranger’s bottle going down the mount. Chimaera: what changes. Chimera: lovers perhaps, molded of two parts which do not fit. Lovers who are not, this trip, having sex. A lover who rubs sunscreen onto the backs of two young women, fellow travelers on the journey, almost kissing them in the water. You, in the stuffy cabin, trying to drag him there for sexual congress—his complaint it is too small, too hot, his wish to sleep on deck. And it is stifling, and tiny. Two creatures jammed into one awkward ill-fitting form, the form of a commitment, the commitment all splintered, the fissures as in the ground, the fire licking from them and only smoke, dimly red, visible. Squinting to see it. Chimera, also meaning antibody. Inoculated now to love. Chimerical: the idea it would last. Synonym: mirage. The dream now: to send him into the underworld, to be consumed. Charon, rowing him into banishment. And me: swimming across the bay but not returning. Striking out. O Zeus, leave me. Only take me to Pergamon, and I will sacrifice him on it. O Thalassa, O Tiamat, I am here and waiting.

BIO: Nora Rawn works in subrights in publishing and lives in Brooklyn. She has pieces published or forthcoming in Dodo Eraser, Dreck Lit, Be About It Press, Hawkeye, Burial Magazine, Some Words, and Michigan City Review of Books among others. She is on twitter at @norabird

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