Alison Petrash-Hall

Threshold is a poetry project I started in late 2019. Its original purpose was a post-breakup autopsy. Then the pandemic began. Writing about breakups seemed stupid.

For the first half of 2020, my quarantine took place in an attic bedroom in a house I shared with two roommates. I only left my room to use the bathroom, make food, take occasional walks outside, and drink Hamm’s in a small inflatable pool in the back yard. I found being submerged in water as often as possible comforting.

This period, for me, represented the threshold between believing most people were good, that the arc of history did indeed bend towards justice, to understanding how fragile the social fabric really is and how many holes have been worn in it through concerted efforts to undermine education, worker’s rights, and constitutional freedoms in the U.S. It also represented our nation’s upward-creeping threshold of tolerance towards the deaths of innocent people.

Here’s a selection of poems I wrote during that period of anxiety and mourning.

Temporary

Every disappointment inflicted by time is
remedied, bluntly, by its insistence.

Its overabundant substance that acts
but doesn’t listen.

If time is liquid it will someday run clear of
our exquisitely delicate domestic dramas.

It rinses away all we have made.

So make, make, if only for making’s sake.

I observe my housemates scribbling
each other love letters between negotiating
bitterly over dishes.

A travel-restricted travel agent exploring her
garden, and raising chickens.

People put on rarely used shoes and go
outside to try to make communion with earth,
letting ants crawl along their forearms, undisturbed.

Many only leave to release some clumsy
new evil into the world.

The air parts with their passing, and
they are as solid and mesmerizing as
brightly colored glass, glittering for now, or
until the last of us drowns and swirls
into the irretrievable deep.

Today, at least, we take a collective
breath if we can, and give ventilators
to the rest, laying claim to our space
among things.

Today, at least, I hold you up to
the light, and believe you are the most
precious thing I have ever seen.

–

I Will Be Angry

Yes, I will be angry.

I can’t stop the scythe from swinging
or the gears from grinding, but
if you think I will go peacefully
spare your prayers for whatever
forces of nature try to quiet me.

If I’m to miss the fiddle
and the stomping, sunburns, sweat,
mushrooms, and ducks bobbing,
heavy children hanging from me,
fireplaces and surprises and time
getting away from me, lose the lies and
triumphs and professing and caressing,
then let me Rage, Rage, not just at the
dying of the light but at the careless
breath that does the snuffing.

I’m told this is only sleep, that
resuscitation is suffering, and that
bright lights before darkness and
cold coma should comfort me.

But if my dreams are of noticing the
empty shadows cast by your water glass,
of neglecting food to lie beside and
listen to you, of thinking there is
something to this, that some things
are simply true, then why wake me?

The clock ticks, and I spit at it.

–

This poem was written as we witnessed the many publicized deaths of innocent Black people at the hands of police, including George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. As a neurodivergent person I was particularly struck by the murder of Elijah McClain.

Place

Where do you take them?

When their fear,
fleet as deer, condenses into
cool rain, seeping into their
lowest low,
sparkling dark with their last stars,
until you drain them?

Can any part of me still
reach them?

Whether lungs yawn them or
ears and eyes savor etchings of their
particle pushing or
fingers, curled in mud,
though different mud than even
yesterday’s, seek them.

I clear space and
make a nest for their breath
in the weight, in the pooling center of
my chest, a known place, and I
repeat them, I repeat
them, I repeat them.

–

And this was written after the uptick in spaceflight missions during 2020.

Astronauts

Lashed together like cattle in
anonymous city blocks, we are
paralyzed, pulled in every direction.

If we could only slide fingers
across the empty, onto shoulders and
through hair, over lips and lashes
and different size noses, feeling breath
on our palms, and knowing that
we are here, we are here.

If we could sense each other gently,
cease flailing, striking, and suffocating.

If we could lift the needing beneath the arms
to take one small step together for woman,
man, and child, for simply person, we could
get closer to where we’re going.

I turn to neighbors, calling names,
and they are tired of listening.

I search for words that can pry the walls of a heart apart.

I hold gazes for longer than strictly necessary.

We reflect each other’s faded, pulsing light,
and then blink, forgetting our objective.

We stare upward at bright, rising rockets,
waiting for rescue that may never come, knowing
they might explode.

My mind is worn from the incessant
petting of expectation, and my soul sore
from wounding and understanding.

I feel at home alone, holding my breath as
long as I can in the bath, as if there’s been
a mistake, as if we were meant to
be mermaids.

And I wonder, wonder if there is
anything else, or if we live to die on our
paved planet and find peace with work undone,
or else have none.

If this grasping, wild-eyed company, if these
plastic walls, are all we can ever hope for.

Love, love, we say, when faced with each other’s,
with our own, pitiable fate.

I will fix you with love.

I will fix me with love.

We dodge knives to kiss each other softly on the heart.

We speak Psalms.

But alone in our houses, lying in bed, we watch
a rocket ready to fly, a spark from a screen shining in the
dark pools of our eyes, and think Exodus.