After the separation, I reclaim domestic real estate
patching holes where CDs once filled every wall space,
delighting in newly discovered electrical outlets
emerging dusty-faced from behind the record cubes.
In the bedroom, I groom the landscape of carpet,
a fresh expanse of low-pile white unearthed
in a morning’s worth of effort: no more Blue Rays
tumbling like rockfall from every nook, no magazines
stacked next to, on top of, or under anything.
Wandering in, my son stops in his tracks.
Whoa, Mom, he says, this is wow. This is
a liminal space. Look it up, he says,
explaining that the bare floor, the green chair,
the sliding door curtains that block passage to nowhere
are like those spaces between rooms in IKEA.
Oh, baby, I think, my sweet teen, your mama knows
this threshold well, this life on the boundary,
this sense of being there, yet not quite there yet—
a between space that, like you, so many find unnerving,
but I am through with the what was, the familiar, am ready
for next, the new beginning, even if I have to linger awhile,
patient in this place of waiting.
is a Professor of English at Ohio University Southern. Light & Shadow, Shadow & Light from Main Street Rag (2018) is her first full-length poetry collection, and her chapbook What the Grimm Girl Looks Forward To is from Finishing Line Press (2016). Her latest chapbook, The Blue Wife Poems, is from Kelsay Books (2022). She edits Sheila-Na-Gig online and Sheila-Na-Gig Editions:
https://sheilanagigblog.com/
