American Road Trip in the 21st Century
Dead deer line the shoulders.
Struck and alone with their soft
and regal features. I count seven
between Pennsylvania and Virginia.
It’s my own dark disappearance
I worry about. The dark, the broken
axle, the shredded tire, the spin,
the need to rely on strangers.
I’m never close enough
to someone who loves me.
Brown and trying to get to the next place.
Feared dead in the middle of “progress.”
Counting Deer at LaBagh Woods: A Meditation
It’s been four years since the pandemic began. The literature is saturated with it. Largely, public patterns have returned to status quo. There are parts of us that have been forever altered. There are certainly parts of me that have.
I wonder about the relationship between sanctuary and vulnerability. A sanctuary is a place you can enter and feel sheltered at your most naked: like a womb, or a bathroom, or the woods, or yourself if you’re lucky.
In 2020 I returned to my body. Age thirty-seven, lightyears from sixteen, when I decided to chase a writerly version of me. I live in the future now, with my tattoos and hiking boots. Girl with her intrepid heart. Daily, I walk the vestiges of the Union Pacific along an aisle of milkweed nestled in a patch of sprawling woods. I have a litany of flowers and a crooked spine.
In the forest preserve, one buck walks along the riverbank, shakes his antlers through a triangular crevice, saunters, browses leaves. On the other bank of this river, a swelling doe carcass lies feeding the soil as the pollution in the city ebbs.
That year was the first in nearly 15 years that I saw all four seasons completely sober. I nested, settled into a home I built while I mourned all the fissured homes I came from. I convalesced. I lamented lost loves and all the Black men, women, and children killed in the street, threatened in the parks as they birded or took photos of their newborns, or held hands with their beloveds.
Forced inside by a virus, I was granted a window to the local world by the internet. Locally, I took to the open natural spaces in my Chicago. Sanctuary is a word for it. Sanctuary, the home of grace.
Grace: a practice of level-gazed awareness, acceptance, and letting go. It’s what I give myself when I start the Couch to 5k. Ah, today I can only walk. Grace, when I push into downward dog, ah, breathe into your calves. A gift, I give my younger selves, oh, you only knew what you knew. I grant it, like the god I talk to would. Grace is how I can grant myself a future. Any hand can bestow a blessing. This body is not what it once was; and, it is still good, still mine. I return to its breathing.
Sanctuary: a consecrated place devoted to the keeping of sacred things. I count myself among the sacred like the trees, the prairie grass, the three full-rack bucks I’ve seen since spring. In the spring, red buds burst, and copper mushrooms sprout. Here on the other side of the winter solstice, brown and ice, and the occasional bright, insistent red berry.
During a global respiratory catastrophe, I reject the story of a woman dying of her own sadness. I am the story of a safe Black woman snapping a picture of a loose rooster in the city park. It is a wooded ecosystem managed by conservationists. It’s the future, here—arrived already. Me, the trees, my neon orange running shoes against the dull rays of the overcast sun. I carry myself to the park again, on my breath, on my weak ankle and bunion, reminded with every stride, yes, my breath will carry me forward.
In the woods, the trees can hear me, and the teens necking by the fire they made. I find sanctuary in ritual. Ritual: any practice repeated in a set precise manner to satisfy one’s sense of fitness.
Time kaleidoscopes. In the park, another day since I entered quarantine, since I left drunkenness. Another day, I lace my orange shoes and run with names in my heart: Ahmaud, Elijah, Breonna, and I hear only my own voice in my head, I love you, I am alive, I am breathing, I take care of you,
I counted deer for two years. Some dead on the highway. Many living in LaBagh woods. I have seen all four seasons. Spring: ice-cold rain and geese. Summer: fresh graffiti reads, I want to kiss you. Autumn: garbage in the river, a Marvin Gaye wood-cutting tacked to a tree asking What’s Going On? Winter: brambles, a falcon, someone else’s coma, clamshell mushrooms, a convocation of branches built up to look like witch’s quarters, a found dead dog, and fourteen miles till the Botanical Garden where a 200-year-old bonsai stretches in its slow, slow, twisted dance.
Sanctuary: where, exposed to the elements, I am part of the natural cycle, free from moral bargain. In my ritual—I learn how safe it can feel to be small in a cosmos full of indifferent wilderness, in a manufactured wild in the chaos of my city.
Maya Marshall is a poet, essayist, editor, and professor and the 2024 recipient of the Theodore H. Holmes ‘51 and Bernice Holmes National Poetry Prize awarded by the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University. She is the author of the poetry collection All the Blood Involved in Love (2022) and the chapbook Secondhand (2016). Marshall co-founded underbelly, the journal on the practical magic of poetic revision. She’s earned grants and fellowships from various organizations including MacDowell, Cave Canem, Sewanee, and Bread Loaf Environmental. Her poems and essays have been published in or are forthcoming in numerous collections and publications including Hunger Mountain, American Poetry Review, the Rumpus, RHINO, and Prairie Schooner. Marshall is an editor-at-large for Haymarket Books and an assistant professor of English at Adelphi University.