BEFORE I FALL BY ELLI MARI 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 141 PREVIEW
I rehearsed being incomplete in front of you.
Left drawers open.
Let the cupboard hang by one hinge.
Spoke sentences that collapsed before the verb.
I wanted you to see
how a person can fail quietly,
how nothing terrible happens
when something doesn’t hold.
I placed my flaws carefully—
not scattered, no—
arranged them like objects on a table
you were too young to reach,
but tall enough to notice.
This is what a mistake looks like.
This is where I come apart.
Look—nothing sacred here.
I thought I was lowering the ceiling.
But you—
you began walking as if the air depended on you.
Small hands, suddenly precise.
You stopped slamming doors.
You closed everything I left open
without looking at me.
I remember the way you held a glass—
not drinking, just holding—
as if it were a decision.
You never said
I will be better
but your body did.
It straightened
in rooms I had already tilted.
You learned silence
not like a child hides,
but like someone measuring the space
between breakable things.
And I—
I kept loosening screws,
kept misplacing my weight,
thinking I was giving you freedom.
I didn’t understand
that you were collecting my imbalance
piece by piece,
fitting it somewhere inside yourself
without instructions.
There is a way you look at me now—
not admiration, not quite—
something steadier,
something that feels like being forgiven
for a thing I am still doing.
I wanted you to know
you didn’t have to be perfect.
Instead,
you became careful.
Which is worse.
Because perfection can crack,
it can shatter,
it can be abandoned.
But carefulness—
carefulness stays.
It lingers in the wrist,
in the way you place things down
like they might remember.
And I see it—
when you hand me something,
when you watch me move,
when you stand just slightly closer
than necessary—
as if I am always
on the verge of falling again,
and you—
you have already decided
you will be there
before I do.
—
There is a video somewhere.
I am small enough
to believe my body can become a circle.
You stand behind me,
one hand in mine,
the other hovering
just beneath my back—
not touching,
just waiting
for the exact point
where I might give in.
You guide me backwards
towards my own feet,
slowly,
as if speed could undo me.
Your face—
so serious.
Not afraid.
Just exact.
As if you were learning
the limits of me
in real time.
And when I reach—
when the shape finally holds—
you don’t celebrate.
You stay.
Just long enough
to make sure
I don’t disappear inside it.
We tried again this year.
Different bodies.
Less forgiving.
The same distance
between my spine and your hand.
And your face—
unchanged.
Still measuring.
Still careful.
Still holding me
before I fall.
I didn’t realise
I was teaching you
how to carry me.
You were never supposed to learn that.
ELLI MARI
I think that a poem can change shape while it is being read, and that the most interesting questions are the ones the poem poses afterwards. I am interested in the distance between something and the story about it. Much of my writing begins with an attempt to look at something closely enough that it becomes unfamiliar again. A peach, a lighthouse, a shoreline, a sentence, a person I love—each appears stable until attention unsettles it. Poetry for me is a way of remaining inside that moment of instability and seeing what emerges. I am drawn to questions that do not have neat answers. Memory, inheritance, devotion, identity, and transformation, not because I wish to resolve the questions but because they resist resolution. I am interested in the traces people leave in one another. I think of poetry less as an act of expression than as an act of attention. The poems that matter most to me are those that alter the way I look at the world rather than simply describing it. I was born in Greece and I am studying a BA in English and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. I have been awarded a scholarship for an MA in Creative Writing Poetry at the University of East Anglia.