But the Light—

Days gone by and I’m searching for it again,
right where I planted it, like a blue pill in my body,
serotonin kept on speed dial.
I dug in with bare hands once, let the hurt live
under my fingernails,
wanted a calendar to keep me.

On Friday, I count the floorboards in this studio apartment.
On Tuesday, I wonder how I can feel more grounded than this—

Nothing holds me anymore but the light.

Up the fire escape to the stretch of roof where I can sit,
above pink blossoms ripe for touch, the exhaust of my steel city,
hear wind chimes somewhere the next street over, and I’m thinking:
Were we ever alone?

I remember the portrait of a public bus,
strangers tilting their heads to the windows, music leaking out,
something about the composition of humanity out loud,
whose voice paints it— it’s all beautiful.
Today, art is the shadow on the back of my neighbor’s houses.
The depth of what goes on inside are stories I can only map out of my brain.
The way I welcome the chance of a sunburn.

This is a new quiet, a lesson on something
like science or your god, this hope
that causes us to continue, baptizes us in new breath.
Whatever it is, is reason alone.
I know there is no ceiling to this worry out here,
but nature puts a lid on the suffering.

She stirs into the lavender wind;
shakes the slender fingers of a tree branch,
kisses your bare knees with the cold,
ushers you back inside with the nightfall
as if to say, “Goodbye, come again—”
And even though you’re tired, and dirty,
and buried with what you can’t say,
you do.

You rise again into the blue light of morning,
because there it is, reason where it drips
from the still-wet petaled shoulders,
spins on the axis of your microwave plate,
reason like an anchor dropped in the stomach of a sky,
or carrying you, if it must,
like a worm in a plump robin’s mouth,
into another tomorrow.

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. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, she writes with the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University. Find her online at www.karaknickerbocker.com and Twitter @karaknick.