The world’s reduced to squares of little nows:
a patch of backyard mends the bedroom wall;
the street zips floor to ceiling, and allows
the ghost cars past our kitchen, down the hall.
And in a garden struggling to stay green,
a snail chews, brooding, on a hosta leaf,
its shell a snail’s eternal quarantine,
its trail the only outward sign of grief.
And then at night it’s we who are reduced
to tears and rages of an unkind kind.
I don’t know how we ever were seduced
by thinking it romance to be confined.
Now you’re a window—me, I am a door
I see through you; you’ve walked through me before.
Katherine Meizel is professor of ethnomusicology at Bowling Green State University. Her writing has been published on Slate.com and in the literary journal Kaleidoscope.
Latest posts by Katherine Meizel (see all)
- Lockdown Sonnet - December 7, 2022