Scuffing through the kitchen, I stopped
to right a slanted card
slipping, as it was, under gravity and magnet.
I pulled its corner to a wrinkle-black space, an open patch
among the others, the red and green and gold
and seasoned blend of photograph-news: a baby
curling into its breath, scraps of gilded glass, a vacancy
on the stair-step where a mother once laughed
beside a couch-full of pajamaed children smiling.
I was once a child smiling, once
a pajamaed child among a throng of children, our voices
glistening like a host of birds
tapping and prodding the pale-pink sky
to wake, to rise.
But my stair-step is vacant too.
Not one but many lost
to time and discord and a waning
sun, which may yet glow under the earth
but I don’t see it, so busy am I
tucking meaning into
the folds of my hands, the corners
of my eyes, the soles of my
faded leather boots.
Aspiring author, poet, literary artist
