Abstract Onomatopoeia

Apart: Starts like lips touching, wormy flesh on flesh, before the jaw drops. The vocal
chords rummage through the hard part, and air rakes up, almost, but the teeth
retract it. Not everything gets out.

Remember: The mem is like a mountain—the climb to climax and the making your
way down, slowly. You’re holding the second m like hovering, and it puts you in the
mind of summer and the unmoving humidity, that understanding murk. Before you
know it, though, you find yourself ending it—toward November, toward December.

Dead: It ends like it begins. People come home and thud their car doors closed,
heavy, meant to keep all their squishy organs protected.

Winter: It starts with the whisk of air, hair driers and furnaces. The house releases
heat like sin from praying hands, and outside you see the laundry fog entering into
the black fragile branches of patient trees.

Sky: You hit the sk—so clean like icicles. Like the hail that hangs up there, waiting to
ding windshields and make us lift up our horizontal palms. Then breathe the y and
see all its bigness. Lying on your back, suddenly, you see it, like relief.

Olivia Olson