Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Enchanted Egg #2

When you look inside through the tiny porthole the lake looks back without blinking.
A little girl has fallen from the raft floating away like a blue rooftop.  She stands under water in clouds of silt and glitter.  In the distance the undulant dark bed recedes till it is only horizon, the murky green light, the giant shape of father sleeping on the couch.

Great translucent rooms wander through one another. Even as her throat begins to burn, even as she is squeezed by a weight she can’t see, brained-shaped shadows cruise the floor.  Things are distorted; when she looks down at her foot it has magnified to the size of a pale blue potato stuck in the silky earth.

This is the world the day she doesn’t die. Though it would be so simple. She’s formed no ties, she can’t read a clock.  She might easily return to the oblivion she came from not so long ago.

At the end of the lake cupped on the white shore fathers and mothers are grilling meat. The sky is a dome as you always suspected.

It is a wonder that a lake can exist in so delicate a shell.  The blue rooftop is skirting the shore.  Below, the giant father rolls over on the couch, a fish flits by like a face, the water is absinthe, cat’s iris, the lucid world, the breathless, even as a pair of legs comes toward her, it is solitaire, even as an aunt’s arm reaches down, it is the moment she wants to look more than she wants to live and is cruelly rescued.

Author: Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Beckian Fritz Goldberg received her M.F.A. in 1985 from Vermont College and is the author of seven volumes of poetry, Body Betrayer (Cleveland State University Press, l99l,) In the Badlands of  Desire (Cleveland State University, l993,) Never Be the Horse, winner of the University of Akron Poetry Prize (University of Akron Press, l999), Twentieth Century Children, a limited edition chapbook, winner of the Indiana Review chapbook prize (Graphic Design Press, Indiana University, l999), Lie Awake Lake, winner of the 2004 Field Poetry Prize (Oberlin College Press, 2005, ) The Book of Accident (University of Akron Press, 2006,)  Reliquary Fever: New and Selected Poems (New Issues Press, 2010) and Egypt From Space (Oberlin, 2013.)  Goldberg has been awarded the Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize from Poetry Northwest, The Gettysburg Review Annual Poetry Prize, two Arizona Commission on the Arts Poetry Fellowships (1993, 2001) and two Pushcart Prizes.  Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies such as New American Poets of the 90’s, Best American Poetry 1995, American Alphabets:25 Contemporary Poets, Best American Poetry 2011,Best American Poetry 2013 and in journals, including The American Poetry Review, Field, The Gettysburg Review, Harper’s, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, and many others.  She currently lives in California.

Plume: Issue #49 July 2015