Lauren Hilger

WHAT IS THE KNOCKING AT THE DOOR IN THE NIGHT?

We know the unseen end in a half phrase
—almost—
we almost almost almost—its marzipan taste,
close to catastrophe. Like the day I overlapped
with the cowboy who drove cattle through the valley 
for three months at a time, a near flipping into the other, but it’s past.
It was almost, almost, the black lake, big as a minute.
Back home on the subway, we went faster.
I let him hold me up, a man who put his hand
on my back so you don’t fall.
Seated in the subway, a man squints to read my gold necklace.
A man holds out his hand, watches his gold ring.
The bills I owe are buried. The balance of this life.
Behind us are the Futurists and the double-deck trams.

LAUREN HILGER is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016) and Morality Play, selected for The Possession Sound Reading Series from Poetry NW Editions and forthcoming in 2022. Named a MacDowell Colony Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry, she has also received fellowships from the Hambridge Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work appears in BOMB, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, and West Branch. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens.