Featured Poet: Karen Keefe

​Dr. Matthias Ripp CC



​
When Helpless Find the Ground

How long have I been sitting here
held upright by this tree?

The sky breaks open. 
rain, fierce and intense,
hides the tears on my face.
His phone call demanding money
has put me on the ground.
Telling me
no food
no place to stay
no way to come home.
I tell him
I love him.
But 
cannot send money.
I torment us both 
with a litany of questions.
Is he with other people 
when he is using?
Do they have Naloxone?
Will he consider 
going to treatment?
A plane ticket home?

He hangs up 
screaming
he just needs money
I am a shitty mother
I have abandoned him.

I finally go in the house
not to sit by the window
but to lie on the floor 
and remember
moonlight on my baby’s face
singing a lullaby to comfort him.

I breathe deep
long for a draught of forgetting
the other memories.
Bottles of medication strewn across the floor
his hand 
open and reaching
just above the pills. 
The smile, a redirection on his face,
“Mom, don’t you need to go downstairs right now?”
My hand closing around a cane, what I almost did.

Splinters reach up from the floor
swirl harsh tendrils in my hair
reach across my chest in a corseting embrace.

I am undone and bound.
No lullaby exists
to chase this nightmare away.





Please Let Me Park the Car before You Jump Out and Run Away

But you don’t. I am sitting on the curb next to my car, planted where your feet hit the ground.
Breathless, after we round the corner at 20 miles an hour. You keep shouting at me and jump out, 
“Fine, see if I care if I ever see you again Mom.”

You leap out and leave me in a universe to the right of where you now reside. I cannot follow without a ticket and there is no map. I do finally get that.
No map
No guide
No magic decoder ring
No breadcrumbs or string to follow
No
you to find
No
Mom
No breath
No way to understand
                            What
Is Happening
Or Why
Or when this fire will stop burning 
In my chest
In your brain.

When the winds and ash settle in the rain of our tears, I am afraid these voices howling in the wind will continue well past the end of time falling between our universes. I can see in your eyes I am dead to you. I mean really, I am dead to you. This monster is reflected back. What speed do I need to reach 
to hyper-jump dimensions and land in the rocks, you live by?

I want to see you again. 

My memories relace my hiking boots and I step over this curb and start to climb those rocks. 
I eat my memories, not of today, but ones that can sustain me: Ah child, for me you live sitting on my lap. We hide behind blankie, and you really do believe no one can see your shining head or hear you laugh.

Can I tune the vibration of your laughter? Can we find each other back in time and now sit down on this curb together? If I promise to be quiet and still, can we agree to excavate the chasm open between us?





Life in Dark Time

I am always waiting for that phone call.
The one where my stories:
how your auburn hair glows
in the sunlight,
how it moves in the wind.
Those stories
will be of no consequence, 
be unnecessary, 
a waste 
of the caller’s time.

So, I keep a picture of your tattoo
in my wallet,
convinced the day is coming.
I will need to send a fax or email
far away
where you will finally rest
on a cold slab.
You far away 
from my final embrace
but still found
the outcome 
of this dark time 
known
at last 
at all.
If I get to do that
to send that transmission
I will finally have 
one instant of mercy.
You let yourself be found.
In that moment I will know
you 
are no longer 
alone and afraid
alone and high
alone and daring
alone and doing 
what I cannot bear to know 
about you.
Alone and dying. 

At night
my skin crawls
with the agony
of not knowing.

I dare too.
Pray for you to come back to me
pray to see you smile
pray 
you are not alone
and there is for each of us 
at least one desperate mercy.

I practice the moment I dread 
but need 
and look at that picture
until I see
you
just born.

We are bathed in dawn’s light
look into each other’s blue eyes.
Time and delusion fall 
I reach out to now claim 
all you are
as mine.

​

Karen Keefe (she, her) is now retired from international education, though her heart is scattered throughout the world with friends who have gifted her with humility, deeper perspective, honesty, and love. She earned a BA in rhetoric and creative writing from Binghamton University (Harpur College). She also holds a MA in Student Affairs with Diversity.  She was one of the editors of The Parlor City Review and published in Anima. She lives in Vestal, NY, with her husband, the writer, Robert Guzikowski.

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