CLIMBING AFTER A FALL

by Kathy Conde

I hold back, feel the pull

of gravity through my boot.

Mac says it will be easy

scaling the vertical

rock face full of cracks

and quarter-inch ledges.

I climb and granite

turns to flat gray.

Handholds visible from below

vanish at a certain height.

Everything is gone—

summer grass, Mac's red car

gleaming from the road,

green silhouette of tamarack

against blue sky, screech

of a redtail hawk. All gone—

even the wind that blew

dust across the road

when I took my first

look at the wall.

All that is left

is rock, my body pressed

against it like a lover,

the pull of gravity

seductive.

* * * * *

"Climbing After a Fall" first appeared in the anthology, New Poets of the American West. 

Kathy Conde won the Crab Orchard Review Jack Dyer Fiction Prize 2014. She has also won prizes and scholarships from Salem International Literary Awards, Munster’s Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Competition, and the Aspen Writers' Foundation. Her stories have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, CutThroat: A Journal of the Arts, Southword, Underground Voices, Word Riot, and others. She lives in Colorado with her husband and son. You can see more of her work at www.kathyconde.com.