Boundary Effect

by Susan Konz

There’s something in my periphery.
Smoking on the stoop, my brother’s head
spins somehow completely around, baseball cap
falling off in the severance. I’m sure, I see
 
it clear as morning & don’t question, let the calm
overtake me when this happens. I’ve cauled my fear
so I don’t jump, so nothing surprises me,
so I don’t even bend to retrieve the hat
 
because look! Look at me! I’m safe, finally,
after all that kvetching & it’s no big deal
anymore. I can move beyond these bad dreams
that spin around, surface and undertow me, can
 
hold my tongue before the scream to see if his head
sits right when he lights his next cigarette, wait to decide
it’s nothing even when I recognize these things dying
around me – a spastic moth in the forty watt
 
porch light, a rabbit three counties north, mid-lane
who won’t even blink as I’m coming straight
toward him and why won’t he move if he’s
more animal than me, more programmed
 
to exist. Maybe I’m the one frozen, scared, half-
way to meet my family where highways have no
streetlights. I tried, but couldn’t swerve
fast enough. I’m left angry to be the one
 
to have to remember the thump-thump
the tires made and how somehow I’m allowed
to, made to keep driving while he got to blink
and cease, no kvetching about fairness,
 
about not sleeping, eyes & cheeks flying off
into corners, half in dreams, not meaning it, never
meaning it, but cagey from the start it keeps giving me
like the flicker when walking into a room knowing I came
 
with a purpose, but unable to recall it. My life beginning
to become this moment, turning around and again
in the kitchen, garage, closet, hallway, new
to myself, my things, absent of all
 
memory but one, and even then, only half fleshed out,
something to be discerned about me, this somehow that
I am bound to my surroundings, how I’m sure I can’t
leave until I know what called me in.