Osmosis
- Osmosis
Rebecca Kaiser, Gibson, cigarette, India, passenger, car, roll-down window, gallop
Cigarette smoke woveinto my curls, right through 100%madras from India, breathed blue-tinged, dizzy bluethrough every alveolus,as my mother lurched the cardown Wisconsin Ave., jamming gasand brake pedals, tilting—sliding me from the rearview mirrorto the carpet, kneeling as smokeclouded out the roll-down window.
Has every turbid dayinhabited me singly:molecule by skin cell,till it dwelt within me?Absorbed like smoke,
like rain, like falling snow,like sweat dampening the saddle,the day two friends and I rode white fieldsin silence, hair and manes whipping sideways,
but keeping our seats, everything presentseeping into me, even as we galloped. [End Page 343]
rebecca kaiser gibson is the author of Girl as Birch (forthcoming from Bauhan Publishing, 2021), Opinel (Bauhan Publishing, 2015), and two chapbooks, Admit the Peacock and Inside the Exhibition. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, The Heinrich Böll Cottage in Ireland, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council and was selected as a Fulbright Scholar to teach poetry in Hyderabad, India, in 2011. She is founder and director of The Loom, Poetry in Harrisville, a poetry reading series. Her poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Agni, Field, The Greensboro Review, Green Mountain Review, The Harvard Review, Ocean State Review, Salamander, Slate, and Verse-Daily, among others. Rebecca lives in Marlborough, New Hampshire, and taught poetry at Tufts University for 23 years.
