[Poetry] Persistence of Time

Read the second-place entry for our week of our 24-Hour Contest, Time Travel

Persistence of Time
By Emily Samples

Tell all the truth but tell it slant. - Emily Dickinson

Time, but make it slant—
like snow during the blizzard of 1993
as observed from my front porch in Kentucky;
The biggest snow my ten years on earth had ever seen.
Slant, like the arc of the second hand on my Dad's pocketwatch,
never permitted to eclipse the minute,
destined to reset to zero at every sixtieth second.
Except, in my Dad's case, his second hand started ticking
in January 1950 and his arc reset at sixty-six.
What's long for a minute, isn't quite so long for a life.
Slant, like the ash falling from my ex-lover's cigarette
in 2011 when he said he'd stay with friends
until I found a new place. Slant, like our promise
to keep in touch. Slant like papers, pencils,
folders spilling out of my backpack midway through second grade,
slanter still because that was my first day at a new school,
my backpack wasn't "cool" enough for 1989,
and was mocked by a girl named Mary.
The same Mary who later became one of my best friends.
Slant, like the path down the hill to the Elk River
where my brother, sisters, cousins and I swam away
the summers of the 80s and 90s, slanted even steeper
today because of the flood of 2016, or maybe its my memory
that slants because I haven't visited that place in over a decade.
Slant, like time, when you try to make sense of it.

About Emily Samples

Emily Samples is an Appalachian writer living in Kentucky. Her writing has appeared in Abridged, Still: The Journal, Lucent Dreaming, Capsule Stories, and elsewhere. She was born in West Virginia on the hottest day ever and is a distant relative of the Mothman.

This piece was written in response to the theme Time Travel.