There are ghosts of all the things we give & they gather at our feet, make us feel like gods, leaf-strewn and still spiraling. Each morning, darker than amber, is a hollow crown for the living. A thousand golden times I’ve tried, but How can I, mother? collect memory like the crisp bite it should be between my lonely teeth. No want is on the edge of wonderful, spread for feasting. No one is at the head of the table, arms bent in prayer like a sharp question mark. Nobody is piling up but the dead, & we sit there as a field somewhere goes up in flames by the very hands that tend to it. & I sit there, patient like I’ve been taught, waiting until the smoke comes around to me. & I eat and eat, until my tongue is rust.
Kara Knickerbocker is the author of the chapbooks The Shedding Before the Swell (dancing girl press, 2018) and Next to Everything that is Breakable (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poetry and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from Poet Lore, HOBART, Levee Magazine, Portland Review, and the anthologies Pennsylvania’s Best Emerging Poets, Crack the Spine, and more. A multiple Best of the Net nominee, she currently lives in Pennsylvania where she writes with the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University, and co-curated the MadFridays Reading Series. See www.karaknickerbocker.com.
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