Blackout
Jackie Craven
I wake from my own snores to find myself in the hall closet. The top shelf is midnight, the ceiling is 3:00 A.M. and the pockets of my winter coat are empty. I’ve misplaced the light. My mother’s familiar reprimand flutters up from childhood: “You’d lose your head if it weren’t screwed in.”
*
Neighbors say the light’s not gone, just apprehensive. It hides in the coils of its compact fluorescent tube. I totter on a ladder and tap the bulb. A spark drifts down, dilutes, and disappears. Sweaters droop from their wire hangers.
*
Off, on, off, on. My light doesn’t come when called. It whooshes through a crack in the door and flies downtown to cavort with neon. It pursues luminescent diodes along Erie Boulevard, follows iridescent roads to the sea, dances with lanternfish, woos electric krill.
*
Alone in the closet, I try to understand. If a child is born without eyes, can she feel light with the tip of her fingers? Does light smell fragrant, and how does it taste? Why don’t street vendors sell light in waffle cones? Will light melt in the sun? Does light dissolve in its own heat?
*
Once I swallowed a firefly — My eyes didn’t blaze, my skin didn’t glow. There was a battle inside me and darkness won. Night follows me from the closet and stands with me at the window. I search the ebony glass; my mother’s reflection ripples and sighs.
Jackie Craven is the author of WHISH, winner of the 2024 Press 53 award for poetry, Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters (Brick Road), and chapbooks from Headmistress Press and Omnidawn. Her poems appear in AGNI, AQR, Pleiades, Ploughshares, and other journals and anthologies. She lives at JackieCraven.com and on Zoom, where she hosts an open mic for writers.
Back to Table of Contents for Fixations