Michelle Acker
The New Defenders #149, Nov ’85: “Lonely as a Cloud--!”
Beast says, “constancy in the heart should still count for something
these days.” The members of this team touch a lot. There’s something
about it—not just because they’re all crowded tightly into panel:
Andromeda, Angel, Candy Southern, Gargoyle, Iceman, Valkyrie—something
else compels them to hold hands, to stand intimately. I wonder if any of them
wear cologne—if they find comfort in the smell of musk, or something
maybe more floral—wisteria, dogwood. They all consider this character, Cloud,
whose body shifts from boy to girl and back again, and sometimes to something
in-between, or both at once. I don’t look like her at all—sunrise-blonde, svelte,
toned with supple muscle—and even less like him, but there’s still something
that condenses, warmly, on my skin. I could dig for it,
if I had the right tool. The team takes to a plane and something
fills Cloud, forgotten and forgetting, with pain. It is not
the doubling that hurts her, but the memory, something
like a spade bisecting worms as it pierces old roots to aerate soil.
Or like a flat, buried stone in its way. Something something--
something we can turn our eyes away from, or if we’re rooted, we can’t.
What Beast said, at the start of the poem—I just think that’s something.
Beast says, “constancy in the heart should still count for something
these days.” The members of this team touch a lot. There’s something
about it—not just because they’re all crowded tightly into panel:
Andromeda, Angel, Candy Southern, Gargoyle, Iceman, Valkyrie—something
else compels them to hold hands, to stand intimately. I wonder if any of them
wear cologne—if they find comfort in the smell of musk, or something
maybe more floral—wisteria, dogwood. They all consider this character, Cloud,
whose body shifts from boy to girl and back again, and sometimes to something
in-between, or both at once. I don’t look like her at all—sunrise-blonde, svelte,
toned with supple muscle—and even less like him, but there’s still something
that condenses, warmly, on my skin. I could dig for it,
if I had the right tool. The team takes to a plane and something
fills Cloud, forgotten and forgetting, with pain. It is not
the doubling that hurts her, but the memory, something
like a spade bisecting worms as it pierces old roots to aerate soil.
Or like a flat, buried stone in its way. Something something--
something we can turn our eyes away from, or if we’re rooted, we can’t.
What Beast said, at the start of the poem—I just think that’s something.
Michelle Acker is a Florida-based poet with an MFA in Creative Writing from Hollins University in Roanoke, VA. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Spilled Milk, Saw Palm, Flock, 2River View, Gesture, Poetry is Dead, Cargoes, Scoundrel Time, Permafrost, The Florida Review, Carilion Clinic Poems in the Waiting Room, and Papers & Publications, as well as in the anthology Rewilding: Poems for the Environment (Flexible Press, July 2020). Her poetry was also recently on public display in downtown Tallahassee, FL, through an initiative by the Council for Arts and Culture.