When I’ve had enough of being pushed away, half sass,
half cruel, by the child in the neon headphones, I leave
the house. Walk to the last field in our neighborhood
yet to be taken by construction, where we once let the mice go
in the middle of the night, one by one as each arrived unblinking
in the plastic tunnel of our humane trap. My sister said
a few blocks’ drive was not enough. We’d have to take them
miles away, or they would come back. But I know it’s possible
to forge a great distance from a small space, between the hall
and the room beyond my child’s door, for instance. One pond
thrashes with minnows, one pond folds its vacancy
behind a black curtain. Birds are shrieking over whether
I’ll snatch their children from their beds. In the grass, a skull
with a long snout and a cape of fur stained green with algae
like the sloth who moves so slowly the earth grows on its body.
Slow as the earth itself that drags the dead along, so eventually,
even this bright jaw and all its teeth will journey to the farthest
edge of this land. The hardest thing about a child growing up
is not knowing how long it will take. How long before they
return? It’s been decades since I held my mother’s hand.
Some things, when they’re done, maybe they’re done forever.
It’s been four winters since we found mouse droppings
in the cookie trays. Sometimes, when we’re all still awake, after
I am banished from the bedtime routine by the child with the face
of a space traveler in blue light, I hear a squeak from the kitchen.
But it’s just that the stupid, hopeful cat has pawed the cabinet
open again, singing the song of the hinge that turns back time.
–
Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of Exploding Head (Feb. 2024), Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer. Her poems have appeared in Smartish Pace, Lake Effect, Blackbird, The Believer, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere.