One foot in front of the other

She extracts something from her mouth,
holds it between two fingers
pinched tight, as if it were her first
cigarette, afraid the cherry would drop
and burn a hole she couldn’t explain.

Some secrets are like a cavity
filled with precious metals
cached in a cavern somewhere between
our reason and emotion, close to appetite
or the place where forced feeding
grates against picket fence gates.

She confounds the white boulders with a feather
dry enough to have been coddled under glass–
supper or a museum’s discovery case,
bottle stopper sealed with decades
of rust, pinning wire, labels of the odd
genetic makeup, dna abandoned, but not lost.

There is no clean slate. The terrain is mapped –
matter or material, patched fabric or bone – even
if the documents are hard to read or harder to know.

* * *

The first 2 1/2 lines are from “Tripping”, a short short story by Marcus Speh up at Referential Magazine. I changed the form of  ”extracting” to “extracted” to suit me.

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