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| Scott Owens |  |
13 Ways of Boxes
1 When the kitchen door slammed shut, your brothers scampered into the bathroom to mother’s arms. Locked out, you hid in a pile of boxes behind the door, crawling deep into half-packed clothes.
2 For years she filled the same boxes with hand-me-down dishes, hand-me-down clothes, always ready for the next necessary move.
3 You remember the undisturbed sleep of boxes, a dark box in a dark house, a Chinese puzzle of containment.
4 In the corner of the closet a box of wounds, bullets, patches, a deck of cards, each one the ace of spades.
5 You filled your first box with nails turned inward, placed your hand inside, imagined a bird pricked with thorns.
6 At work he relished the act of breaking down boxes, using his own fists to shatter their cardboard spines.
7 On the mantle seven music boxes play “Beautiful Dreamer.” She moves through the room as slow as the winding of a clock, her shadow more substance than she.
8 He keeps his bad heart in a box lined with velvet, the whole thing shrinking beneath the echo of its own beating.
9 The box speaks to you at night, cardboard tongue whispering: “Are these words worth writing down? What could you do to keep them? Is any of this really worth saving?”
10 The box of your voice closes its lid around you, every no, every shouted word another layer you can’t get through.
11 Who can know what shape their own box will take? Yellow grain of wood, gold clasp above what might be a door, handle unturned. In the dream of boxes you see a man with a box on his back, your head resting on a box, your body cut in two in boxes, your life measured out in closed doors.
12 What if you opened the box and found nothing inside?
13 In the morning a disturbance of boxes falling from a dusty shelf, each one spilling its store of abstractions. | ||
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13 Ways of Insomnia
1 It was mostly the heat in places like Greenwood, Augusta, melting sheets into pools of sticky thick wetness.
2 In dreams, when I’d run, I’d wake up sweating, breathing hard, eyes probing into dark corners.
3 Such night terrors could hardly be called insomnia, more a fear of things fled in light finding you unprepared in night’s unknowable terrain.
4 At 10, I wandered out to the stone porch, found my grandfather stringing stars into shapes of the exotic world, nighthawk, bobcat, praying mantis.
5 “You mustn’t have anything to fear,” he said, “to stand in the doorway of storms like this. You know the power could whisk you away, but you must be okay with that, knowing no regret, disappointment, ambition unattained.”
6 When I told him, my father, the Vietnam veteran, verbal abuser, 5-time ex-husband, said I must be feeling guilty. 7 I study the ceiling’s constellation in the 14th house I’ve lived in in 12 years, each with different faces looking back at mine.
8 You hear every breath as loud as wind through open doors. You feel your heart beating like something wanting loose. You’ve studied 30 shades of gray, every quality of half- light there is, counted sheep, ceiling tiles, days, the number of times the heat comes on. There is little to do but listen to what might be coming, to each thing transforming in darkness.
9 No one sleeps here between the trains, the teenagers, my neighbor smoking.
10 The noise of the world is deafening, conversations, needs, emotions unassuaged, putting things back, drowns out what might be heard in silence.
11 If anything, it’s only the guilt of not getting enough done.
12 I lie as still as death until I know you sleep, then rise, wander from room to room, afraid to turn on lights, steal what everyone deserves. 13 At 3 A.M. almost no traffic, the road as black as the past you remember, any future you might imagine.
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