I remember how in the jittery early stages of grief I panicked about how to pass time. I would give myself a goal to read to the end of the sentence. I landed on each task like a beach. Washing the coffee pot would take a few minutes if I dried it too. My hands knew what to do. I learned I could burn an hour walking four miles, and I came to know how long each route and road around the house would buy me, time when I had no reason to think of anything but putting one foot in front of the other. Now on the final night of a year from which it seems impossible to find a way forward I remind myself of this, how we must continually wake to mourning and spend the small change of panic in the tasks we find, how they add up over time. To everyone I love I say Meet me there in the space where we are not broken, only paused, snagged on the cold wire of terror. Recovery is a motion we know, a path we make by walking.
Amy Sage Webb-Baza is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emporia State University, where she was named Roe R. Cross Distinguished Professor and directs the Donald Reichardt Center for Publishing and Literary Arts. She is managing editor for Bluestem Press and Flint Hills Review. She publishes fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, and is author of Your Own Life: Kansas Stories (Woodley Press, 2012).
Editor-in-Chief Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street) and Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize). Her poetry has appeared in such journals as TheNewVerse.News, Carolina Quarterly, Ninth Letter, The Sun, and Valparaiso Review. Harbor Review’s microchap prize is named in her honor.
The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative 