The day before the southbound hiker
was airlifted off the mountain

I ran the bald summit between slaps of lightning.
Why do we believe art is worth our suffering?

Rather, in what room were we taught in order to make art
we must first suffer? We hitchhiked to the hostel together,

so wet we rode in the trunk with the labradors.
Because I did not know why I had gone alone

to the mountain I was happy to meet her
and to watch her, trying to understand myself.

We washed our socks our pants our tops the underwear
we had worn rightside then inside then rightside out

together in one shared load.
We walked through town in borrowed clothes.

What we call suffering may simply be the effort
of work. Mechanical but joyful. A weight

towed up an inclined slab. Perhaps what we call
suffering is simply lack of privacy.

The desire not only to make but to make public.
Like this walking. I am alone for many days,

not speaking. Still, it is a public act
to follow a trail from beginning to end.

When you have walked too long it helps
to pretend the earth has vanished from between

the stones. To leap imaginary chasms, ridiculous.
Why am I here? Perhaps I came for suffering

that was mine, only mine, from beginning to end.
In that suffering I found this southbound stranger

who lay breathing in the bunk next to mine.
And I, restless with the end of my suffering,

slept only when I matched my breathing to hers.
The next day she crossed south to Lincoln Gap

and died. I have dreamed every night since
that my knees were broken cups. I cannot stand

and have somewhere I need to go.
When I was a child I was a sleepwalker on the spiral stairs.

Was awoken by my hand pressed against the window’s
bending screen. I once believed joy would ruin me.

When the storm lifted from the mountain I was ruined.
Ruined by the valley and the living sky.

H.R. Webster has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, and the Fine Arts Work Center, where she was the 2021-2022 returning poet. Her work has appeared in the Guernica, Poetry, Black Warrior Review, Muzzle, Ecotone, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, What Follows, is available from Black Lawrence Press. Poems etc. at hrwebster.com.

Janaina Tschäpe was born in Munich, Germany in 1973. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg and her Master in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Throughout her twenty-plus year career Tschäpe’s multidisciplinary body of work has encompassed painting, drawing, photography, video and sculpture. Janaina Tschäpe lives and works in New York. Her work can be found in important public collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among others. She has completed public commissions in New York City; Miami Beach, Florida; São Paulo, Brazil; and Holbæk, Denmark.