Disengage

By: Kaitlyn Wall

The house empties.  It becomes
a cardboard box, the walls flimsy
in the wind.  All day, you are running
to lean your weight against them.  The whir
of tires on the street outside is
absent.  You know even in the burning
sunlight that your life has hollowed out,
like a pumpkin scraped of its fat seeds.  One
night, you walk outside and stand
on the sidewalk, your arms spread,
searching for the moon hanging on its string
like a hard, pearlescent memory.  It is gone,
and when you wander back inside
and the door slams behind you, the plaster
around the edges begins to crack. You under-
stand then, that you cannot continue
to hold on.  The pieces you are clutching
in your fist are the shards of a windowpane;
they are slicing your palms.  You begin to unravel.
By the time they find you, you are nothing
but a pile of loosened yarn on the hardwood
floor.  They tie tight knots along your length,
carry you out into the night, and toss
you like a lasso around the moon.

 

 

Kaitlyn Wall is a senior at Susquehanna University, and is currently serving as a genre editor for RiverCraft Magazine. Next year, she hopes to attend an MFA program for poetry, and believes strongly in the following: tattooing, evolution, and equality.