KARA KNICKERBOCKER
CW – suicide
Rewriting the Suicide Note
poetry finalist in our 2020-2021 Writing Contest
into a poem in the emptying parking lot,
the kind of pavement you could bleed on
again; seventeen. Parallel lines, backing
your mouth into a space where it’s still quiet.
The grocery stores off Rte 322, the sick heat waiting
to move in on you. Imagine your hometown,
all the loaded memories in the burn barrel
of your mind, then light it up just once.
Oh, woman/child, when you stop hungering
for her, is there any trail leading back
to the willing animal that you became?
Reason is a window, is a radio driving by.
Reason is also how I spent years trying to write
this anger & all I could talk about was a dead bird
in my dream & what the color red means,
everything in me, flammable & knowing.
All this time my mouth tastes like metal & no
& yes, I’m so full from it all, so starved for more.
My chest could be a cavity for seagulls. This utility pole
a cross. Remember I cut my hair when you cut the engine,
sat cross-legged in front of your roadblocks, didn’t I do everything?
The broken handle on the passenger door, duct tape on a taillight,
dad says the bird is a canary, mom says finch, neither have words
for the too-puffed chest, no breath but glass under wings.
You talk about god like I didn’t grow up in the country,
like I didn’t know hurt in the church of the open wild.
I remember looking at gutted deer & roadkill all my life,
almost as if I was trying to study how to die.
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: Poet Lore, Construction Magazine, Portland Review, and the anthologies Pennsylvania’s Best Emerging Poets, Crack the Spine, and more. She currently lives in Pennsylvania where she writes with the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University, and co-curates the MadFridays Reading Series. Find her online at www.karaknickerbocker.com.