Portside

F is for Fear

By Heidi Seaborn

And it is raining. Someone left an upright piano

beside a steep road. Its case exposed like a throat.

Clouds of data my mother says, concerned that

data is consuming the blue of the sky. I try to explain,

but then decide she’s right in a way—the

fear of extinguishing air, a snuff film on loop. I

get it, imagining the Titanic tourist submersible

holding a shrinking supply of breathable air adrift

in the Atlantic’s depths. The five inside, inhaling

just enough oxygen. Does opera music play?

King Charles sends thoughts and prayers. I see

Leo and Kate in the midnight blue of Titanic,

motionless, breath clouding their frosted lips.

Neptune welcomed sacrifice. To recover the

OceanGate sub is a complex mission: the depth,

pressure of descending 8,000 meters. It must be

quiet there, in the ocean’s gullet. It isn’t the actual

rape that I can’t forget after decades, it’s the

strangulation. And I’ve wondered if in a past life,

that’s how I’d died. Maybe in all of them. Dying,

unable to breathe, piano wire tightening into a

vise around my throat. Gustav Holst’s Neptune’s

wordless chorus of women, an operatic ending.

X on a map of the ocean floor. XOs of data

yoking the sky. Somewhere a sub in the Midnight

Zone.  The breathing slows to a pianissimo coda.

Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of the 2022 The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize in Poetry. She is the author of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. Recent work in Blackbird, Beloit, Brevity, Copper Nickel, diode, Financial Times of London, Penn Review, Pleiades,

Poetry Northwest, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi holds an MFA from NYU. heidiseabornpoet.com