I want to build not a portal to
but another new dimension, put it in a box.
We all function within a set of constraints,
whether six flat sides or the time between
being born and when we die. To think
that I am not trapped is a lie and yet
I lick the edges of my habitat’s boundaries
and find them to taste sweet,
revel in the sugar stench of rotting flesh,
the path of decay on which we are all
set from the day of our first breath.
And yet or perhaps because
I will not let this house I did not build
retain inherited regret its roof
becomes a lid that opens over days
that fade with the memory of what we ate
for dinner. If I can remember
where I buried the ring of keys
I will hear them again jingle
Saturn’s outer soundtrack in my hand
as I stalk, walk the borders of land
deeded to me, for now at least.
If you stand back far enough
everything is temporary, ownership
a construct. I like to be reminded
of to know the limits of
my restrictions the insufficiency
of language, find other ways
to transcend or transport
into and past more dimensions
than we can ever touch smell breathe be.
In every house there is a door
we cannot see. I want to need
must find how to pass
beneath its hidden lintel, enter
the whooshing stream
that endures behind
permeates everything
✶✶✶✶
Jesica Carson Davis lives in Denver, where she works remotely as a technical writer for a software company. Her work has appeared in The Laurel Review, Storm Cellar, Stoneboat, Zone 3, Columbia Poetry Review, and other places. She studied poetry at the University of Illinois, worked as a typesetter for the University of Chicago Press, and was the final Alice Maxine Bowie Fellow at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. She’s currently working on several manuscripts of poetry and an ongoing project making poemboxes, which sculpturally interpret her writing.
