Where have I gone from:
Room of rot.
Dim, waterlogged celluloid.
Salted brine-dark room,
somewhere close to sea.
Unwindowed room.
Room far by crow-call from
my land-locked father.
How to say I want to return
from where I never knew
I was— Girl sewn
to the window’s seam; Girl hemmed
to the keyhole’s hollow: Is this
coming through in the transmission?
My end is static: slush
and snow from the telephone
line creeping like thistle in the yard.
Slush and static, the image
warping in the dark
nest of my thorny sleep.
Somewhere in the deep of me
I’ve buried the lock to the cellar,
the soot-singed engine-room
of memory’s looming furnace. Somewhere
behind the thrumming lick of the mirror’s blank surface
the girl playing dead
has pinched her lips white,