Hallway | Sallie Fullerton
February 13, 2024
image: Mick Toma
Smoke scroll
Was it me who went into the room
or did the fact take me there?
I know I sat on the floor. You
on the bed.
Advice hangs in the air becoming
a smoke scroll. Something you know
will unfurl years down the line, by then
malignant. Despite myself
I do not take the lifesaving precautions.
I am choosing between two equally expensive cars.
Your penultimate bed, I am still on the floor.
I am in the next room, fetching towels. Before
tonight, I had never thought of a bed as something other
than time itself centered in a room.
Each morning thousands of facts are christened as results.
The amount of impossible things we see in a day
collapsed the morning you lost
your ability to read, which you did
matter of factly.
Facts enter the room like buildings. We believe things we know
are false. Eventually absolutely everything
becomes horizontal. Is a horizon. On my final bed
I may also want scotch and a cigarette.
I’m writing it down now.
Life is beautiful.
It lasts a long time.
Hallway
Going down one long street
a structure rises into perspective
not becoming larger but becoming larger
to me. I am reminded
that someone always needs to be
in front of the tragedy
seeing it head-on
as it appears closer
as the street appears to move
but does not.
As life appeared to change but did not.
The news isn’t all that interesting
at least not when you hear it
explained – he kept asking me
to imagine new things and I thought
so this is science?
Imagine a magnet that turns everything
in its field in one direction now
imagine a hundred magnets
now imagine light
but it’s spinning.
I forgot to ask what everything meant.
It all felt like an insult I couldn’t
understand, said in the wrong tone
so that I smiled along but was left
alone like a painting waiting
impatiently in the hallway of a language.
Each plan is partial his life
becoming more and more something
you must squint at to make sense of.
And everyone in a circle saying
“another”
“another?”
“another!”
The world is our bedroom
The days breathe in fits across
us. Simple, slow growing
open-legged
as lichen. “No change”
or “improvement”
like a blemish.
I ask the questions but don’t want to work.
I electrocute the pond of the poem
then walk away, facing out.
Out of the window you turn up
in a slit of precise light as if
we had slept there
in this room
a long time ago
and forgotten.
Sallie Fullerton is a writer currently living in Brooklyn. They received their MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2021 and were awarded a Fulbright Award in 2023 in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. Their work has been published in the Bennington Review, Frontier Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Ex-Puritan, Literary Hub, and the anthology Pathetic Literature edited by Eileen Myles (Grove Press, 2022).
