Kim Kent

TALKING TO STATUES

You said, being with me was like waking up with glass legs.
I said, this house is not a home.
Not your home, not my house.

I like to imagine frogs tied in knots, or foxes sulking, and from time to time English owls and grandfather clocks.

There are many things I am afraid of: mainly untimely death by way of fishing line, roller blades, or botulism.

Mostly, I am afraid we've forgotten too soon, or worse, remembered all the wrong things too long.

You take too many silent pauses and I feel compelled to fill them all, every last one.

In the last year of my Grandmother's life she believed she was Dorothy and her family the lion, the tin, and the straw.

I never would have made a good Dorothy. Maybe, it was all that yellow standing in the way.

Because there was nothing left for you and I to do, we wrote down everything we wanted on a slip of paper and burned it.

Crinkled, pale, and absorbed into flame, because who knew how the universe worked, and if it were up to us, it just might work this way.

Kim Kent is a writer currently living in Seattle WA. She studied English and Cornell University and hails for New England. While not writing she spends her time working in restaurants and reading for Poetry NorthWest Magazine.