Turn and Return
       

Listen: I am taking myself
away. I am bundling my

needles and my bookshelf,
my ladle and my orphaned

gloves, and I am hauling
them to another town.

Forget the blips, the jinxes,
the hillocks in the fabric

of my intent.

———

The pavement here is rotten
with the cloying shimmer

of enough. The houses draw
together at dusk, shuttering

in the kids: their small,
patient guns and bells.

Girls wear delight around
them like a shawl that

passes from one freckled
back to the next. Everything

in its place.

———

They are wrong about
the consequences of

flight. How impossible
it is to desert the grime,

the woven leaves the insects
have half undone; how we

need the belligerent train and
tilting stair. How we retrace

ourselves on streets that
never wanted us, crowing

home, home under the dim
light, damp and gleaming

and unseen. Listen: I am
taking myself away. Listen:

I am gone.

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Copyright © 2013 Suzanne Marie Hopcroft All rights reserved
from The Carolina Quarterly
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission