On Ongoingness: Four Stages
Alison Powell
To the East
You were twenty-three and did not know what to do. You had an idea for yourself, so you followed it. A place and a time. This is you all over. You maintain now that the idea was to go to a big place to learn what to do. You sold your hours for pennies, the trade: you would appear at the coldly precise time and disappear eight oiled hours later, troubling no one in between. Hours of performance held at each end by fixtures of friendlessness. No one is playing a game. No one is drinking from a common cup. No one wants to be there. And yet, you stay. Good for you.
To the West
California Zephyr Car #532, Sleeper 53. My chest feels as it has for days leading up to this moment, full to bursting. Designated smoke stops are Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska. The conductor says, “Enjoy your trip across the breadbasket of America, the greatest country on Earth.” The sun flashes in and out between the cars of a passing freight train. A red boxcar reads “Burlington Route: Everywhere West.” I want to cry.
To the North
In Barstow, the anesthetic wears off. I thought I could make it across the Mojave before the pain in my jaw set in. (Root canal, punchline.) As narrow as I’ve made that desert through a hundred crossings, this time, it would widen out, stretching me with it. I pull off to take a pill, but I can’t chew or swallow, which is funny to me because I’d been eating crow for weeks. (Divorce, eviction.) There is nothing out here but bats, blown treads, and that vast desert with enough room, even for a hot mess like me.
To the South
One of the features of divorce is that the day comes when no one cares what’s become of you. Coordinates no longer matter, so you roam. Might as well. We had both become missing persons that no one was missing. The leash grows long when no one is watching. And so, we arrive in a town called Independence, California. It looks as it did in my mother’s day, when as a scout leader, she too roamed here, off in the woods and telling stories over fires. No one observing. No one remarking. No one correcting faults. We are free. We are free. We are free.
You were twenty-three and did not know what to do. You had an idea for yourself, so you followed it. A place and a time. This is you all over. You maintain now that the idea was to go to a big place to learn what to do. You sold your hours for pennies, the trade: you would appear at the coldly precise time and disappear eight oiled hours later, troubling no one in between. Hours of performance held at each end by fixtures of friendlessness. No one is playing a game. No one is drinking from a common cup. No one wants to be there. And yet, you stay. Good for you.
To the West
California Zephyr Car #532, Sleeper 53. My chest feels as it has for days leading up to this moment, full to bursting. Designated smoke stops are Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska. The conductor says, “Enjoy your trip across the breadbasket of America, the greatest country on Earth.” The sun flashes in and out between the cars of a passing freight train. A red boxcar reads “Burlington Route: Everywhere West.” I want to cry.
To the North
In Barstow, the anesthetic wears off. I thought I could make it across the Mojave before the pain in my jaw set in. (Root canal, punchline.) As narrow as I’ve made that desert through a hundred crossings, this time, it would widen out, stretching me with it. I pull off to take a pill, but I can’t chew or swallow, which is funny to me because I’d been eating crow for weeks. (Divorce, eviction.) There is nothing out here but bats, blown treads, and that vast desert with enough room, even for a hot mess like me.
To the South
One of the features of divorce is that the day comes when no one cares what’s become of you. Coordinates no longer matter, so you roam. Might as well. We had both become missing persons that no one was missing. The leash grows long when no one is watching. And so, we arrive in a town called Independence, California. It looks as it did in my mother’s day, when as a scout leader, she too roamed here, off in the woods and telling stories over fires. No one observing. No one remarking. No one correcting faults. We are free. We are free. We are free.
About the Author
Alison C. Powell is a fiction writer, critic and essayist whose work has appeared in Seneca Review, Oxford American, Typishly, Colorado Review, The Guardian, Interview, Guesthouse and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She holds an MFA in Fiction from the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers and lives just north of Dallas.
About the Work
“On Ongoingness: Four Stages” was designed to be a progression, examining specific moments in life as part of a continuum. But I soon realized that the continuum was neither a straight nor a curved line. The course appeared to me as directionals, each represented by a set of images or an episode, together suggesting a kind of compass of choices. In my lyric work I am either attracted to symmetry or to a breaking of form. Here, the goal was to create a tight symmetry, compact and contained, like a body, through the four directions as well as through sections of approximate equal length. I am the container making progress, like a railway container, up and down, back and forth, different at all stages.
About the Author's Process
"2022 was the strangest year of my life and I was forced to broker a new creative process as a result. When both of my parents died within a few months of each other, I was thrown into a world short on time, space, or appetite for concentration. And yet, I was not going to stop writing. Working in a tight temporal corner meant my lyric work became more compressed; within the endless cloudbank of loss, images became sharper. In the lyric I could focus, and narrowing the field brought comfort—perhaps not unlike the security felt by a swaddled baby. I produced and edited in short bursts and emerged refreshed. In general, I work at two ends of the extreme, flash nonfiction and long narrative pieces, fiction and non-fiction, though I’m currently exploring the middle ground of short fiction."
Alison C. Powell is a fiction writer, critic and essayist whose work has appeared in Seneca Review, Oxford American, Typishly, Colorado Review, The Guardian, Interview, Guesthouse and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She holds an MFA in Fiction from the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers and lives just north of Dallas.
About the Work
“On Ongoingness: Four Stages” was designed to be a progression, examining specific moments in life as part of a continuum. But I soon realized that the continuum was neither a straight nor a curved line. The course appeared to me as directionals, each represented by a set of images or an episode, together suggesting a kind of compass of choices. In my lyric work I am either attracted to symmetry or to a breaking of form. Here, the goal was to create a tight symmetry, compact and contained, like a body, through the four directions as well as through sections of approximate equal length. I am the container making progress, like a railway container, up and down, back and forth, different at all stages.
About the Author's Process
"2022 was the strangest year of my life and I was forced to broker a new creative process as a result. When both of my parents died within a few months of each other, I was thrown into a world short on time, space, or appetite for concentration. And yet, I was not going to stop writing. Working in a tight temporal corner meant my lyric work became more compressed; within the endless cloudbank of loss, images became sharper. In the lyric I could focus, and narrowing the field brought comfort—perhaps not unlike the security felt by a swaddled baby. I produced and edited in short bursts and emerged refreshed. In general, I work at two ends of the extreme, flash nonfiction and long narrative pieces, fiction and non-fiction, though I’m currently exploring the middle ground of short fiction."
