no eye, no heart drops from its monstrous socket

Today's poem is by Sarah J. Sloat

Curtains

For weeks I have been waking up
in the living room curtains,
their shrug and frump,

and there
I have not met a single person.

In the folds where I am rolled,
some mornings I have seen the Andes,
strands of wax, and in the stitches

once I made out a line of ants
carrying their minute burdens.
Everything that appears possible

can be turned into something impossible.
If a face appears, if I recognize a posture,
I raise a hand to flatten it.

A tassel bunches the damask
like the tie of a robe,
but when it’s loosened

no legs fall out, no eye,
no heart drops
from its monstrous socket.

-----

Sometimes (these days) I write something and when I awaken the next day, I am dismayed to feel that slipping of feet, the loss of ground once stood.
Sometimes I feel like I should be feeling something true, something deep like the Pacific. Instead I'm standing head above water in the shallow end of the pool.
It's the pool and not my pool because this house was never mine at all. It was the father's, not my father's. My mother said today, "It's like you're thinking about it clinically" when I was speaking about the father. That distance, those words. It is the heavy thud of waves crashing upon the dykes--nothing can seep through, not even the dullest thorn. It is a story, it is a film. It is not my life sometimes, but her life.
I convince myself I am good at this adaptation, that my daily routine lacks stability and so does my life. I was a nomad, I have no town to call home. My home is an unhome.
I always wanted to meet Francie Nolan. I thought before we were the same. Her dad was an alcoholic who didn't get better. She loved books because they gave her life color, some beauty, some way of finding it growing up through the cement, an umbrella tree against all odds.

Sometimes I stay locked, all potential energy. Sometimes my feelings are put on hold, a receiver I meant to pick up but I keep finding other things to do till I forgot you were on hold in the first place.

I love you, God.

Sometimes I feel small.

Also, there was an Amber Alert on television. A one year-old girl in Novato was kidnapped by the father who beat her mother's head in with a baseball bat till her soul went someplace my eyes can't see. I pray the police find her safe and sound and that she never remembers seeing the things she saw and that someone good takes care of her and she knows that her mother loved her but it's not the only love she'd ever know. Please let her be alright, God. And let her mother be free from all suffering and pain, and be waiting for someday when she'll be reunited with her baby.