Constructing the Damage

by Kara Knickerbocker

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Previously published in Defunct Magazine

There is nothing else to say--
It’s true I had wanted my neck wrapped in gold.
Come December, I needed the moon fastened closer

to God, or me stitched to them both. Fate was sure as fishing line,
a beacon of cobwebbed mercy in someone else’s language.
Before we could shake ourselves loose, there were pockets

of highway, our silence shoved into them, tangled metal,
glacier tongue. How many words for bullet do you know?
What about the wonder of a mouth, the sound it makes

when one fires into the back of the other? Look--
I have followed all the threads, tooth & nail, wrote
a dictionary of hurt, and I can’t blame the cracking sky,
​
the flameless fire, for what darkness swallows but the more
I unravel, the closer we are to driving straight into the wound,
the further we become from the only hope of heat.

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Kara Knickerbocker is the author of the chapbooks The Shedding Before the Swell (dancing girl press) and Next to Everything that is Breakable (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from: Poet Lore, HOBART, Levee Magazine, Portland Review, and the anthologies Pennsylvania’s Best Emerging Poets, Crack the Spine, and more. Her work has received support from Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Murphy Writing at Stockton University, and the Gullkistan Center in Ireland. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee originally from Pennsylvania, she currently lives in Hawai'i and is a proud member of the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University. Find her online at www.karaknickerbocker.com.

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