punched through time—

outside the kitchen window, when I finally looked up from my homework—

like the night before I’d punched through space as a ball that was put

by a boy in the footwell of the hotboxed car at 110 for wont of space.

The hag’s face was set in a hood, a nosegay of scrambled sight,

chopped meat to scrape

away with a knife—the method and the tool

missing from the lifetime I spasmed for.

The white hoodie I knew by sight and smell

was suddenly a shapelessness: living water

rose in the preserve of the moon.

The terror punches through any moment now

as I stand years later in a paddock below a bare volcanic hill, its dank shine

an algae-like organic creep toward the full moon. I can choose—

and I choose Nina in the hag mask

over a windscreen fogged to a blind light—the spasm congealed

into a dance so literate, of digging down while standing back.

The hobble on the spot that’s memory.

Oh shit I say to her spectre. I’m now recalling

the story you told of fishing at night in the mangroves up north

in a tinnie with a local named Tubs,

who held two tinnies like a fractal growth

in one hand the open can stacked on the spare.

He called his tinnie Tubs, and sat for hours

like a fractal growth attached to the outboard motor.

As you fished, your sounds had shadows that weren’t echoes

but a fore of living water

your torchlight overshot then rushed back to, overshot

and rushed back to a pre-existing gash in the black,

the saltie’s waxen mouth that was blindly open

but not impatient. Patient as all hell.

Yes, wide open, you clarified, and no you didn’t feel like you almost died.

L.K. Holt