Hope
by Katherine Gordon
You’re the red slash, the sinister bar, the side where the blood flows through. You’re the peg-eyed dummy in the seamstress’s shop pinched into dresses you’ll never wear. You fish with crusts; you bless the grubs; you never slurp your soup. How you do it, I don’t know, but in your little cauliflower ears you make madrigals out of din. Nurser of dregs, sorter of socks, scarecrow stitched with birds’ nests, oh, my heart’s jalopy, what makes you stick around? Stir the cinders, clear the ash, phoenix me instead. I listen at the door for the iambus of your tread.
Katherine Gordon’s work has appeared in the US and the UK in journals including Arkansas Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Arcturus.