What Holds, What Spills (A running list)
Dionne Lee, July 2020

A rubber band wrapped around a glass jar that holds quarters for laundry, now turned brittle, put there for reasons I cannot remember.

I once watched a girl fall off a bucking horse. She flew overhead, arms spread wide but heavy. A dust cloud rose as if the ground was a beaten rug. Her sternum dragged across dirt so dry it looked like sand, sending her forward, followed by her long braids. She stood up quickly to everyone’s relief. The horse was still and had watched the whole thing, occasionally lifting their hoof to stomp the ground.

My new neighbor leaves comfrey and water in plastic bags in the garden by our building. They’ll ferment and turn into a brown sludge to fertilize the plants. My other neighbor yelled at her the other day saying they were bringing fruit flies into his apartment.

At eleven years old, I took a two-day bus ride to a camp in Oklahoma for “at risk” youth. There, I learned: heavy cream, sugar, vanilla, a pinch of salt in a zip lock bag; close it slowly, making sure to hear each snap. The bag goes into a metal can. The metal can goes into a bigger metal can and is surrounded by ice. We all stood at the top of a rocky hill, let our cans go and chased after them as they careened off rocks. They rolled to a stop, battered and misshapen. Out of breath and a little dizzy, I sat on a hot rock and ate the best ice cream ever.

I could have done the zip line too but I cried after climbing the fifty foot rock wall and was unconvinced that a simple cord would be able to hold my seventy-pound body in the air while flying over treetops.

10 p.m. on a Wednesday, sharing difficult words with an old friend. A build up I could not ignore. Words that could have, and probably should have, been said long ago.

I held a thermometer up to a hot iron to watch the mercury rise. As it passed 110 degrees, the tip burst, a delicate and high pitched shatter of glass, and little silver balls fell and rolled, pinging to different ends of the kitchen floor.

The last time I made a photogram, my paper got brushed with some light and a diagonal shadow lived permanently on the image. Now, all the darkrooms are closed and some days, I’ll stand in my bathroom, thinking of ways I can turn the room into a lab: I can cover the window, hang a curtain over the door (that doesn’t close all the way), hope one of the cats doesn’t try to push it open, get a door stopper and move the litter box, my partner will have to hold his pee. But then, I get tired of the planning and inconvenience, when light gets in everywhere and leaves shadows anyway.

A ceramic colander made by a friend, nested in between bubble wrap and sweaters, cracked during the move to our new apartment, two exits away on the freeway. Weeks later, I picked it up and the handle broke in my hand, cutting my thumb, blood dripping into my other hand as I made my way to the box of Band-Aids in the bathroom at the end of the hall.