The Missing

by Carolyn Srygley-Moore

Nobody I know I know is missing, not my daughter, spouse, not
myself: I know where I am most of the time, right here, right now,
in this given point in history…most of the time, if not
now. I could be lying on a forest floor somewhere, amidst
browned leaves preparing to switch on like bedroom lights; I may be
trapped in a house burning down, walls falling in, the painted stars
collapsing; I may be bound & gagged by a best friend
turned stranger, masked, unmasked, & left on the Tennessee roadside
at night…But I will seek as I find, for in your will is my driver, my
passenger car leaving at eight. I will seek a four leaf clover
in the mass of weeds & nearly-orange sunflowers turning
to, not follow, but confront the light…finding at least one serrated blade
of grass by which to whittle the clay scooped from the creek's
red banks (was that last hour, was that years past?) as the crickets
rub their legs together, yes, clay, a tower spinning wet on the potter's
wheel, almost, yes, erotic. For the environment is suspect, the green
pheasants flushed, & startled as they are startling...I need walls, walls
of brick or poison of the table’s ether, I seek a way to tell the bird
I have for supper from the caged bird that sings in my yellow kitchen,
the bird I keep as my familiar…no, really—I know where I am.

Carolyn Srygley-Moore is an award-winning graduate of the Johns Hopkins University's Writing Seminars and a Pushcart nominee; her digital chapbook Enough Light on the Dogwood is available at www.mimesispoetry.com. Her work has appeared in numerous reviews to include Antioch, Mimesis, Eclectica, The 4 AM Poetry Review, The Pennsylvania Review, and the antiwar anthology Cost of Freedom. She lives in Upstate New York with her husband and daughter.