Here & There

Will Frazier

I can count the times it happened on one hand.

All before I was eleven or twelve.

We’d be sitting at the dinner table.

My father would be speaking.

When I looked at him, a voice in my head said

This is your dad, he is speaking, you are on earth, this is your life

& when my mother spoke & I turned to her, the same.

Just before it began, the voice hurtled me

into space. As it spoke I traveled back to the table

in slow motion at the speed of light—

like the moment you swear you’ve stopped

moving in an elevator or on a plane save for

that little buoyant pocket in your core. Terror

& wonder in equal proportions canceled me,

a witness with no plot. Until the voice—faster,

repeating, sounding more like mine—signaled

return. The last time it happened, I wanted

to delay my arrival & somehow I could.

For seconds I hovered above my checkered seat,

my parents’ words sharpening those charred beams

along the load-bearing wall.

Will Frazier is a poet and the managing editor of The Yale Review.
Originally published:
September 1, 2020

Featured

10 Ways Ms., Sassy, and Jezebel Changed Your Life!

How contradiction drove fifty years of feminist media
Maggie Doherty

How Emily Wilson Reimagined Homer

Her boldly innovative translation of the Iliad is an epic for our time
Emily Greenwood

In the Shallows

Why do public intellectuals condescend to their readers?
Becca Rothfeld

You Might Also Like


Lovecraft and Me

How cosmic horror gave me hope
Kieran Setiya

Blanca

Jared Jackson

Subscribe

New perspectives, enduring writing. Join a conversation 200 years in the making. Subscribe to our print journal and receive four beautiful issues per year.
Subscribe