By Chelsea Rathburn

My mother calls about another death, this one a
neighbor I haven’t met who took his paddleboard out
at dawn and never came home, body and board found
drifting a day later. Given his age, we guess a heart
attack, but when my parents drop off a casserole, his
widow explains he died by suicide in the place he
loved. She says it matter-of-factly, their teenage
daughter standing behind her as my parents fumble
their condolences. 
She thought they were through the worst of it, she says,
and hearing the story of strangers’ pain I think maybe
ours will never end, or maybe this is how it will end for
us, just when I think we’re safe. The ebb and flood of
your depression determines the rhythms of our days, for
whenever I think we’ll never sink so deep again, your
face becomes a mask and I become someone who says,
Your father is having one of his spells, as if you’re a
wizard, or cursed. I’ve told you how my grandfather
thought that his epilepsy was a sign of Satan, and how
my grandmother, watching him preach, her eye trained
on the pulpit, would leap to her feet when she saw a
seizure coming, speaking in tongues as if the Holy Spirit
moved her, since that alone would keep the congregation
from seeing what she saw. Love oh love, can love be
enough to save us, can I be life vest and vessel and
breath?

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Chelsea Rathburn is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Still Life with Mother and Knife (LSU Press, 2019). The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets, she lives in Macon, Georgia, and teaches at Mercer University. Since 2019, she has served as the Poet Laureate of Georgia.