The Floor is Lava
by Kate Finegan
Susan Circone, Red Tide, cotton, silk, cheesecloth, floss, 18 x 12 inches, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
The Floor Is Lava
Kate Finegan | NOV 2023 | Issue 29
We’re walking down the sidewalk of the big city where we live when one of us shouts the floor is lava and we reveal our true selves / half of us jumping as if every moment of adulthood were hot coals and those words are the reminder ouch it’s burning / a heaping quarter pausing like mice when the lights come up, like oh shit that’s right, that’s what makes life real and then, remembering, flinging themselves into action to lift their feet up off the ground / and the rest are the worst, the ones whose bodies twitch at that command but whose eyes cast about to see is anyone else doing it or is this all a trap, an attempt to expose the kid in grown-up clothes / and maybe that kid is a kid in the sense that everything can become a game or maybe that kid is a kid in the sense that everything is absolutely petrifying and so new, everything’s so new and unknown / only that kid is not a kid because that kid is thinking nothing’s new anymore and also the known is even scarier than the space under the bed / and one person says yeah right out loud like they’re something special / and that one person has sown poison in the we who were walking down the sidewalk of the big city where we live when one of us shouted the floor is lava because that one person made every single one of the rest of us choose a side, the yeah right or my body knows this, knows what it is to stay aloft
Kate Finegan is a writer and editor exploring the interplay between stories and reality. She serves as novel/novella editor for Split/Lip Press, and her work is supported by Canada Council for the Arts, SK Arts, and Access Copyright Foundation. She lives on Treaty Six territory in Edmonton.
Susan Circone has lived on both coasts of the U.S. and currently resides in the Portland, OR area. She started quilting in the early 1980s and has been working off and on in fiber ever since. After learning the fundamental skills of quilt construction and how to dye and print her own cloth, she continued her art education at Portland Community College. Susan’s work predominantly uses abstracted microbiological and cell imagery that ties into her background as a research scientist in the geological sciences.