Knitting In The Dark
A teenager lives alone in a four-story house.
And all four stories live in her.
You know what it’s like.
People full of closets; closets full of people.
Like living in castoff shell.
Creaky, cracking. Where to turn when turning is all you can do?
She looks for ways in that may lead to ways out.
She is hollow as the house,
shaky as the windows when a truck
loaded with asphalt rumbles past.
A mousetrap finds her pet gerbil.
No, it’s the other way around.
So now not even a warm body to talk to.
Her door key a knife, her bones metallic.
Shadows eat at her until she is reduced
to a needle, two needles knitting in the dark.
She’s never left the earth but it seems to have left her.
So forgotten, she looks for herself in the dust
behind the furnace. In the cobwebs lacing
the attic where time has gnawed holes
in the quilts pieced together from grandma’s skirts.
All rags now.
In the cupboard one jar of honey
crystallized, hard as ice on the lake.
It bends the spoon she uses to dislodge one lick.
Who, you wonder, will dislodged her
from this abandoned state?
Oh, for just the taste of something sweet.
Susan Johnson’s poems have recently appeared in TAB, Trampoline, The Meadow, and Rhino. She teaches at UMass Amherst and her commentaries can be heard on nepm.org.