The Door
By Emily Tuszynska
The day out of focus. Egg on the floor half-wiped, the dryer’s buzz. What am I looking for, I keep thinking, as if it’s a thing I’ve set down and forgotten, something I might find again and take up in my hand. I was just—going back up to take out the meat to thaw for supper. Underfoot, my daughter. Snick, snick, the snips fall from her scissors. A fistful, a smear of glue. Sometimes my life seems so far way it’s almost invisible. A blue dot on my phone’s screen tracks my sons’ ride to the lake. Sidewalks. Leaves crushed beneath bike tires. I’m half here, half there where they are, restless light off the water flashing among trees in a code I can’t decipher. Upstairs my daughter keeps picking out the same six notes on the piano. Stopping. Repeating. Waiting for the song to take hold. Daily I press against the familiar hours, searching for a gap, an opening. When the path meets the water’s edge, the wind gusts off the water like a draft through some hidden door.
Emily Tuszynska lives with her family in Virginia, just outside Washington D.C. Her poetry has appeared in The Georgia Review, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and many other journals. Her first full-length collection will be published by Grayson Books in 2024.
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Poets with children, we've all opened and closed this door.
When I am a Poet
I’m a poet when I swim:
I made this poem in the pool,
reaching out and pulling in.
Words are like water when you swim.
I’m a poet when I’m doing laundry:
sorting loading, soaking, spinning –
the running water washes loose the words.
I collect them from the lint trap in the end.
I’m a poet when I give my kids a bath:
whole stanzas can arrive in just a splash,
and as the bubbles exit down the drain,
I smile when the foolish rhymes remain.
I’m a poet when I’m sailing:
flying on the glassy sea,
drifting, rocking in my little boat,
swallowing the words rising in my throat.
I’m a poet when I dream:
setting words free in a stream
watching them disappear as I let them go,
sinking into the mud below.
I’m not the poet of my dreams.
My poems get lost in the morning when I wake.
When I put my feet upon the floor,
I rise to find I’m nothing more
than the person in the dark before.
Then all the tiny pieces fall away,
only what other people see, and need can stay.
All the happy singing words go free.
They fly off to find another poet who is not me.