Poetry by Kara Knickerbocker

               ​ Randy Heinitz CC


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Small, Sober 

In your Southside apartment on the phone with my mom light years away when you pull out the dollar bill, George Washington shrinking, covered in white dust like Colorado mountains you skied, fresh powder & I can see now from the doorway our two worlds colliding, head-on, slickness from your black leather ice sofa & her voice cradled, familiar in my ear. I don’t want her to hear how wrong this feels.
 
I feel small, sober. I feel small sober.
 
We all have our ways out of this oblivion & maybe this is yours, a nasal passageway or vein to a place that doesn’t hurt, & I could tell you maybe I’d kill to be up that high too, or that I think about death at least three times each day but still I’m young to the fear, watching your eyes red & lost, waiting on that universe you can’t create but still try to, 

would fucking die trying to find--

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blaze
                after Jan Beatty

because by now I thought I would’ve found part of me that I love
even just enough to stay, or swallow sufficient strength
to split open the earth to see its red roots
and because I still haven’t, I’m glassy-eyed tired of looking
for something rich enough to stem through veins 
and reach whatever’s left here
because breath in the body & a pumping heart 
doesn’t translate to life and because
I’m tired of just barely showing up for mine
because not having a reason is reason alone
but mostly because I still dream 
of setting the apartment on fire 
with me still inside
all because 
I don’t remember 
what it feels like 
to burn

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All the Missing Places 

I’ve lost her,

again and again.

My childhood bedroom, rose quilt,

don’t wake those floorboards.

A summer dress   lifted
 

pressed hard against cold chain link
                across the train tracks
                                                on the boardwalk, he laid his shirt down  

but still there was sand in the fresh   
                              cut on my back.

In the shower,         hands high on the tiled wall,

Oh God                 / wanted to wash me clean again.

Upstairs at a frat house, on the attic floor--

didn’t know till I woke alone        naked in the dark. 

Cried the whole way home, wet earth clinging

to my heels. 

Parking lot of a movie theater, hotel when I thought 
               I was in love               everything white and pure 

 as linen, as the first snow in December.
 
In a mother’s double wide trailer, she watched us close the door.

Far into the woods, in the backseat
                                                              of that truck I loved so much, 

a best friend’s spare bedroom, 

the smell of whiskey and smoke. 
 
Propped up on the kitchen counter          my eyes on the exit.

The bedroom of my first apartment, a father’s couch, 

the basement of a house I couldn’t map   
                                                              my way back to. 

Straddling in the water

off the shore of a Florida town 

in front of a picture window                                 overlooking Copenhagen streets,           
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those early hours,
               regret bending over                 
                                into the heavy dawn.  

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Kara Knickerbocker is the author of the chapbooks The Shedding Before the Swell (dancing girl press, 2018) and Next to Everything that is Breakable (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poetry and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from: Poet Lore, Hobart, Levee Magazine, and more. She currently lives in Pennsylvania and writes with the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University. Find her online: www.karaknickerbocker.com.

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