About the Feature
He sighs like a hinge in an empty cabin
Found by a traveler smelling of fire.
Are you still you? he murmurs,
And lying beside him,
She can’t say.
She’s found the jade dress
In a barrel of clothing
Past workers abandoned.
Torn in the arm,
In the belly by a nail,
And either
She’ll patch the holes
Or she won’t.
He’s told her
How a clutch of baby mice
Fell from the rafters of this room—
The highest point for miles,
Nails in the eaves melted
Flat from past lightning—
The mice still harboring
Their blushed shadow of birth.
How he opened the door to the roof
and swept their bodies like petals
With a straw broom into the dark.
He puts his hand under the dress.
You are many different landscapes, he says.
About the Author
Sophie Klahr’s poetry appears in the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Agni, and other publications. She is the author of Meet Me Here at Dawn (YesYes Books, 2016) and the chapbook _____ Versus Recovery (Pilot Books, 2007). She lives sometimes in California and sometimes in Nebraska.