Chelsea Rathburn > Quotes

“I blame that little village in Spain,
the one with the whitewashed houses
in a crescent along the sea,
a fleet of pastel fishing boats,
and that celebrated coffee with brandy.

A sour wedge of apple lurked
at the bottom like a tea-leaf fortune.

Because we couldn't afford the fish
we ate pizza with peaches and oregano
on the beach, the sun and breeze conspiring.

Seeing us there beneath the cliffs
and the postcards of the cliffs,
who wouldn't have predicted luck and beauty?
Can I be blamed for loving it all
and thinking it was you I loved?”
― Chelsea Rathburn

“London returns in damp, fragmented flurries
when I should be doing something else. A scrap
of song, a pink scarf, and I’m back to curries
and pub food, long, wet walks without a map,
bouts of bronchitis, a case of the flu,
my halfhearted studies, and brooding thoughts
and scanning faces in every bar for you.
Those months come down to moments or small plots,
like the bum on the Tube, enraged that no one spoke,
who raved and spat, the whole car thick with dread,
only to ask, won’t someone tell a joke?
and this mouse of a woman offered, What’s big and red
and sits in the corner?
A naughty bus.
Not funny, I know. But neither’s the story of us.”
― Chelsea Rathburn

“Squatting in the coppery mud of the drainage ditch
behind my cousin’s house, we searched for fish,
saw none. We found a speckled frog instead,
unspooling a long, gelatinous thread
of black eggs in the water. Then fire ants—
my feet a blaze of pain, a fumbling dance,
and fact and memory begin to stutter.
What happened next? What curses did I utter?
And how did I ever get back over the fence?

I remember having a kind of reverence
for the whole affair: the pity I got, each bite
growing large and lustrous as a pearl, my tight
and swollen toes. I must have liked the pain.
What else would make me prod again, again?
A whole week hobbling barefoot on the lawn,
and still I missed the welts when they were gone.”
― Chelsea Rathburn

“Your paperwork in, it’s like the morning after
a party, the shaken survey of damage,
a waste of bottles where there was laughter.
It all seems so much more than you can manage:
the accusing cups and stubbed-out cigarettes,
the sun assaulting the window, your throbbing head.
It’s not enough to face your own regrets
(though they’re coming back fast, the things you said)
because someone’s trailed bean dip across the table,
someone’s ground salsa in the rug with his shoe.
So you start to clean, as much as you are able,
and think how far those hours have fled from you,
before the hangover and your sour tongue,
when you felt lovely, and infinite, and young.”
― Chelsea Rathburn