Poetry

Hillel Steinberg photo

By

Sarah Cheshire

Doors

Tell us what you don’t remember, they said.

There are many doors, but which door

Did you walk through that night,

Be specific. Can you identify it on a map,

Can you find it in relation

To all the other doors:

The sliding grocery store doors

Where your mother left you to face

The man who closed the door behind you

That night. The door of the house

You silently returned to. The second door

You attached to the entrance of your home

Years later, so you could continue to escape—

*

Tell us about how doors

Open to more doors;

Take us back through the houses, door

After door after door after door, back

To the original door; the door you tried

To keep shut— Remember

Search your body for the key

Turn the knob come on yank harder

Can you feel it twist in your gut,

Can you smell rust soften

To rot in the dusty upstairs room

Where bedsheets still writhe

And flesh holds no words.

Peek inside:

Can you spot your past

Self, shrunken beneath

Laughter’s

Indelible hands—

They said,

Tell us what you don’t forget.

Sarah Cheshire

I am currently pursuing and MFA at the University of Alabama, where I also serve as an assistant editor for the Black Warrior Review. I am the author of the chapbook ‘Unravelings‘, and my essays and reviews have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Scalawag Magazine, River Teeth and Brevity. Additionally, I was awarded the Kurt Brown Prize for Creative Nonfiction (2018), the Etching Press Prose Chapbook Prize (2017), and was a finalist for the 2018 Disquiet Literary Prize.