On Hesitation by Kerri French

And then one day I felt the edges

                         of my body contemplate 

                                                                 the lake

as I paced the length of the bridge

            the metal beneath my feet

shifting

the way I imagine a train’s tracks turn

                          towards sky when left alone

which is to say my body felt

                          like there was nothing left but sky

its length left alone to splinter

                                        like tracks across my skin

I saw the heads of turtles rise 

                            slowly from the water

Thursday’s sunlight sudden and red 

                                         how once I was five and saw

hundreds of jellyfish attack

                           a girl in the shallow edges

of the ocean 

the sudden welts rising

                          across her stomach like a sunset 

I knew I would always recall
                                                    the same way I recall

a girl that must have been me  

my thoughts reaching for jellyfish

even

             in the clear depths of a lake

which is only another way

                          of saying

                                     I reached for any name

but mine

             the day I felt my life was no more

than a single paragraph 

                                          no punctuation or pause

Kerri French is the author of Every Room in the Body (Moon City Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Moon City Poetry Award and the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in Washington Square Review, BOAAT, Copper Nickel, The Journal, Mid-American Review, and Barrow Street.