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.