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      June 25, 2023F Is for FearHeidi Seaborn

      And it is raining. Someone left an upright piano
      beside a steep road. Its case exposed like a throat.
      Clouds of data my mother says, concerned that
      data is consuming the blue of the sky. I try to
      explain, but then decide she’s right in a way—the
      fear of extinguishing air, a snuff film on loop. I
      get it, imagining the Titanic tourist submersible
      holding a shrinking supply of breathable air adrift
      in the Atlantic’s depths. The five inside, inhaling
      just enough oxygen. Does opera music play?
      King Charles sends thoughts and prayers. I see
      Leo and Kate in the midnight blue of Titanic,
      motionless, breath clouding their frosted lips.
      Neptune welcomed sacrifice. To recover the
      OceanGate sub is a complex mission: the depth,
      pressure of descending 8,000 meters. It must be
      quiet there, in the ocean’s gullet. It isn’t the actual
      rape that I can’t forget after decades, it’s the
      strangulation. And I’ve wondered if in a past life,
      that’s how I’d died. Maybe in all of them. Dying,
      unable to breathe, piano wire tightening into a
      vise around my throat. Gustav Holst’s Neptune’s
      wordless chorus of women, an operatic ending.
      X on a map of the ocean floor. XOs of data
      yoking the sky. Somewhere a sub in the Midnight
      Zone. The breathing slows to a pianissimo coda.

      from Poets Respond

      Heidi Seaborn

      “This afternoon I saw a discarded upright piano missing its front panel in the rain, which brought on feelings of exposure and vulnerability, triggering thoughts of fears, my mother’s and my own greatest fear—of being unable to breathe. I’d been thinking about the five people trapped in a submersible at the bottom of the Atlantic, their oxygen dwindling. I chose to write the poem in a constrictive form—a left/right justified abecedarian. It’s a throat, a submersible, a dark cloud, an upright piano on the page. And it’s a straight jacket to write in, each word carefully chosen, as I imagine the inhabitants of the submersible rationing their words, their breath.”

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