In No One’s Land

Paige Ackerson-Kiely

Selected for the 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Prize by D.A. Powell

A sample poem from the book

Foreplay

You are sitting on the bed. The motel room is the color of breastmilk, nutritive water rinsing the palate of you. The sheets are not soft reminders of human capacity for forgiveness with their random tufts like a father roughing up his boy’s hair; son you’ve made me proud. There are times when an absence of pride means the lion is eating his cub. The lioness under some reeds growling like an unwound basket. Unthreading stalks like tight stitches in all the wounds you don’t mean to make, then abandon, embarrassed. Here is a man darning his sock. Here is a woman spitting into a sink. Here is all of Berlin in the creosote of the coughing, sitting primly at the windowsill, looking out. You lean back on the bed which is like curling into a giant yawn; pretty, ambivalent shrug. Any minute now someone will push his way through the door and announce something. Dinner is served. The surgery was a great success. I’m sorry ma’am, but you’ll have to come with me. Answer a few questions.