Non-Endings
- Jul 10, 2020
- 2 min read
by Carol Guess and Rochelle Hurt
I had an ending once. I knew its name the moment I saw its face, so I called to it every day until it knew me too. My little endling, trailing me to county-line bus stops, to gun-powder boyfriends and cherry-bomb bathrooms. Shadowing into existence. One morning I found it lying in a field with a flower in its mouth, not breathing. How could you, I asked, upend me like that? I didn’t know how easy endings were to come by.
I would have so many. There was the one who moved in with me, box after box empty. We arranged its non-books in alphabetical order, then color-coded, then spines to the wall. You don’t even see me, my ending shouted in the middle of the fight that ended our beginning. Then there was the ending that wouldn’t end, started to stalk me. An ending that refuses to give back its key is an unwanted lesson, dressage of dread. Later, there was the ending that sounded like a scratchy heartbeat, somebody’s beginning.
Endings can be quiet like that. They scream less than you’d think. Sometimes an ending is mask-muffled, rubbing sanitizer over its mouth. Sometimes an ending sounds like air hissing from a can. It coughs like a radio scanner. Sometimes it’s just boots shuffling on the porch, announcing nothing. But eventually an ending pauses for a breath and everyone else rushes in, talking at once. Eventually an ending will unend itself and pour right into the street.
Carol Guess is the author of twenty books of poetry and prose, including Darling Endangered, Doll Studies: Forensics, and Tinderbox Lawn. A frequent collaborator, she writes across genres and illuminates historically marginalized material. In 2014 she was awarded the Philolexian Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement by Columbia University. She teaches at Western Washington University and lives in Seattle.
Rochelle Hurt is the author of In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street, 2016), which won the Barrow Street Poetry Prize, and The Rusted City: A Novel in Poems (White Pine, 2014). She’s been awarded prizes and fellowships from Arts & Letters, Hunger Mountain, Poetry International, Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, and Yaddo. She lives in Orlando and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.
