Giant and Ear: Christine Boyka Kluge

Wingless

Christine Boyka Kluge

The blank-eyed house is just starting to dream, its black thoughts still captive beneath the shutters, pressed flat like sleeping bats. Slowly, they begin to unfold their wings. They are hungry for something that courses deep inside your body. Some nights darkness drains your essence, keeps you from crawling out of bed come morning. You burrow your hot face into the pillow, wriggle smaller inside the twisted sheets. Behind closed lids, your eyes dart side to side, tracking the jagged flights in your mind.

Like the house, you hide your fears by day. You keep them tucked close to your heart, like bad cards. You don’t want anyone to see your losing hand, the nightmare about to fan its leathery wings. You’re bluffing, aren’t you? Now, as you drift toward sleep, your fingers unfurl, twitching. The cards swoop from your palm in a colony of shadows.

You wake with your eyelashes glued together, milky-eyed, almost blind in a bar of sunlight. You feel like you’ve lost your hold, fallen wingless from the ceiling. For a moment, your mind is as empty as an abandoned cave. Then faint squeaks and clicks echo inside your skull. The silhouettes of leaves twittering at the window startle you back into your human body.

Borrowed Mirror

Christine Boyka Kluge

I took a long look at myself in your mirror. I stared, picturing myself as you would see me now, twice as old. I traveled past the usual glass wall, through tarnished silver, into your empty room. My eyes refused to blink. I searched for you everywhere. Of all people, you, my friend, would understand this inability to move, this lichen-splotched boulder balanced on my ribs. You know all about the stale breeze of feeble applause for good behavior. A bed with a hinged roof. A future the size of a pinprick.

I looked in your mirror until looking ran dry, until my vision was parched and distorted. Why was I hoarding relics and souvenirs, vials of beach sand, and lockets whose portraits have crumbled to dust? When at last your dark eyes surfaced from the past, they examined me with their familiar glitter of intensity and sweet mischief. I felt guilty for summoning them, but withstood their touch, the pain of their lost light. I saw myself in their depths, and in their reflections.

Startled, I let go of what I could no longer carry, of all I could not feel. Broken branches littered the floor of your room. Your eyes, like a scouring wind, plucked the dead parts from me. I became narrow as a peeled twig, a searching vine, something that might thread through a pinhole, find light, and bloom.

Christine Boyka Kluge is the author of Teaching Bones to Fly (2003) and Stirring the Mirror (2007), both from Bitter Oleander Press.  Her chapbook, Domestic Weather (2004), won the 2003 Uccelli Press Chapbook Contest.  Other honors include winning the 2006 Hotel Amerika Poetry Contest and the 1999 Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award, and receiving several Pushcart Prize nominations.