Out of Time
Little Knives
Small Bites
Broken things in a cluster.
The last echo of the social weave.
The rain could pierce thin skin
and bones. So the ruin creeps
upon us, so we’ve fed it well.
Trees are haunting a conscience.
Follow the empty river, counting
rocks, this is what is left, no use
howling. Shame about
the children. No ark this time.
Here in the immediate, it’s too much
to bear. Look up and down,
back and forth, the last bird
may be flying, its wings a scoff
of blue against a cloud.
I remember cotton slips
and patent leather shoes and the time I came home
from going to Confession on a hot summer day
and noticed the side zipper of my seersucker dress
was down and oh, the humiliation.
I prayed no one had noticed but the sting
remained and I swallowed it with all
the other awkward moments that I kept as secrets
that would puff up in the dark of night to
nettle under my skin
and pierce me like little knives,
the penknives my brothers
were not allowed to have but sometimes did.
How these niggling cuts found crevices
to hide in, so that even now I recall
giving the wrong answer in a Times Table Bee
and having to sit down. I was so swamped
with embarrassment I pretended to be sick,
sick enough to go home, where I also had to lie
to my mother, compounding the sin.
Each misstep or perceived stumble, the little failures
and reckless falters like a bag of stones
we haul through the years, those of us
crouching in our shadow selves.
The quiet eats me
in small bites.
No witness but
a reckless wind.
Hurry, I tell my soul,
depart on your own terms.
Mercedes Lawry is the author of three chapbooks, the latest, In the Early Garden with Reason, was selected by Molly Peacock for the 2018 WaterSedge chapbook contest. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner. She’s published short fiction in numerous magazines and was a semi-finalist in The Best Small Fictions 2016. Her poetry book, Vestiges, will be published in late 2022 by Kelsay Books
