Caught Alone (poem)

Caught Alone

Loved one, they gather on the stairs

The passageway is closed

The door will jar against a darting shape

Unnoticed, their kind, snuffed in the daily cataclysm

One will tear the fabric

Go

She is standing in the kitchen of her mother’s house

Caught alone

Under the pop-eyed voyeur’s thumb

She hears disjointed blurbs of speech

They come two or three times

Over the telephone’s open line

A mind like a termite’s nest

Chopped in the blender of cultish whispers

Reassembled in the conqueror’s chalice

A tumor of lard

Finds this valedictory declining fuss

Heartbreaking, stirring, condemnatory, just

The mockery of solemn things is more than

She can understand

O, the battery, the battery is dying

Its tiny voice is piteously crying

Syllables of digital diddly-hoo

A mylar balloon is flying, loosed

From the used car lot where once it bobbed

“For sale”—for nothing—“There it goes”

Loved one, in this room, they’ve laid a sash cord

And the window is unlatched

Others lionized in death

Trembled here to heal the wayworn breach

Caught Alone

The Dismaying

(2015, Stephanie Foster)