In midlife,

by Kristen Holt-Browning

 

feeling reckless and suburban, we are tired of the pond
at the far end of the yard, the same old ecosystem as last year, stones

slick with repetitive moss, another snakeskin shed at the little shore,
another new reptile sated, sluggish, from the frog and mosquito buffet.

The water beckons but we will never enter, the algae depths a murky
mystery in this spongy-moth summer of our discontent, their hunger

a destruction, the leaves ragged and demolished, the constant crunch
as they eat and shit all day, all night. The devastation almost soothing,

a background steadiness. We seem ceaseless, too: we still wake up
every morning, although we are likely in the lateness of our lives

and like I said we want to do something impractical, unnecessary,
poorly thought out or not at all, so we buy a hot tub, a second body

of water in the yard now, this one a chemical cliché, but it’s okay, I’ve got
my back to the molded plastic and I’m thinking about Dante, and how

he constructed hell in layers, the devil at the bottom, frozen forsaken
in a lake, and I’m wondering when we melted hell, shifted it from cold

to burning, Satan moaning in the molten muck, forever gnawing cursed bones,
eating the sins of Judas and a Roman guy whose crime I can’t remember. I slip deeper

into artificial bubbles. This is how some people baptize those they think deserve it:
the body submerged, only to emerge into a fresh and godly new beginning—

look, even the two of us, when we get out of the hot water, we are pink as babies,
larval and famished, our skin both softened and chemically evolved.

 

 

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Kristen Holt-Browning is the author of the novel Ordinary Devotion (Monkfish Book Publishing), the poetry chapbook The Only Animal Awake in the House (Moonstone Press), and the forthcoming poetry collection Watershed (Fernwood Press). She lives in the Hudson Valley region of New York State, where she works as a freelance editor. Learn more at kristenholt-browning.com, or on Instagram @theholtbrowning.