A Poem by Ronda Piszk Broatch

Ronda Piszk Broatch

Ronda Piszk Broatch

Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Lake of Fallen Constellations, (MoonPath Press). Ronda’s current manuscript was a finalist with the Charles B. Wheeler Prize and Four Way Books Levis Prize. She is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Fugue, Blackbird, 2River, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry, and Public Radio KUOW’s All Things Considered.

Biography with The Physics of Time

I cried on my Australian Shepherd’s neck the day I gouged the length
of my mother’s canary yellow Coronet. It was the year of dating three men

at once: one who drank often, and slept off the migraines he got every twenty
eight days, and the classical guitarist who watched me stretch three nights

a week in the campus gym, another one whose family drove only Alfa Romeos.
Once, I was partially paralyzed after an afternoon of sex. Sometimes I forgot

to call back, forgot to jump out of an airplane, broke a promise to wear my hair
in a mohawk the year I turned twenty-one. I feared I’d never learn what lay

beyond the border of the Universe, and that my mother would read my poems.
The sound of rain on the arena roof tethered me to earth as I rode my horse, Ferro,

and I marveled how close to the dirt we’d get when racing around barrels.
When I read the note under my windshield wipers that said “Going to Alaska -

I want to buy your car,” it made me love my 1973 Dodge Dart even more.
It was the year I met a man in a kilt, when I told the other men I was juggling

goodbye. Yes, there was a reason I cried, why I abandoned my horses, sold
my Dart, now singed by fire all down its passenger side. Why the planet seems

so smooth and slow when really, we’re flying so fast through our tiny solar system.
How do we fit all we know neatly between the tip of Mount Everest and the Sea

of Tranquility? You want to know if I married the man in the kilt, and I can tell you
my hair is a little shorter these days, that I see the world through 2.5x readers,

that clouds are sweetest when I’m flying above them.