Sara Turing’s Archive

Box 1: Childhood Drawings

Next, we see the child become

obsessed with frames, in which he finds

a world enough. A house’s windows

show the day’s compartments:

dinner, soap and water. Sleep

a graph of Zs, an uphill train

of endings. Now I know my ABCs,

nexttime won’tyou—

Start again tomorrow, sun

fixed in its corner, light gloves up.

All bodies thickly bordered, never

leaving home without their shadows.

When the child

reaches nine or ten,

infinity begins

to vanish: skin

no more contin-

uous. The highway’s

blacktop pocked

with holes. Water

takes the shape

of its container;

cirrus can’t be reached

for interview.

In this phase,

the page, the hour,

the neighborhood

only end and end.

But then see him enter

the years of loop and spiral,

shapes that cradle soft

bodies of gastropods

he picks up on the beach.

A hardened hurricane. Wave tamed

close to the opening—

something like round, something like

what was once the one world.