F Is for Fear
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