By Sheila Squillante
Climb Through
–after “Climb Through” by Huck Beard
We appreciate a workaround, a short cut,
side door, a hack–frank, square portal
to an elsewhere, an anywhere, a get us the hell
out of here, someplace we can quiet
our eyes and tongue–affix our limbs to a kind
of darkness. Let it be a kind darkness
wherein the planet’s low droning
suddenly hushes, silence stretching
forever across an event horizon, where
there is no signal, no balance due,
and no one expects anything of us.
Oh, friend! We are happy to find you
here in this paroxysmal state, to beckon
you now into the stairwell, to join us on the top
landing, under a thin spread of light.
Stand with us inside of it so our shadows
elongate and shift, become flimsy spindles,
securing nothing. Lift your leg—we will
help you—and straddle the handrail,
one foot heavy with expenditure, the other
empty as dark air. Square of syncope,
square as dark as sleep. A space to wait
out curse and cacophony. Darkness
as reset. Quiet as cure. You’re almost
there, friend. Hoist your bulk over
and topple toward the solicitous void.
We’ll follow soon enough, climb through
the tinted window of this vicious
living, and leave what little has been left to us
just outside the frame.
Sheila Squillante is the author of the poetry collections, Mostly Human, winner of the 2020 Wicked Woman Book Prize from BrickHouse Books, and Beautiful Nerve, as well as three chapbooks of poetry: In This Dream of My Father, Women Who Pawn Their Jewelry and A Woman Traces the Shoreline. She is also co-author, along with Sandra L. Faulkner, of the writing craft book, Writing the Personal: Getting Your Stories Onto the Page. Her nonfiction has appeared in the Rumpus, River Teeth, Brevity, Bennington Review, Barrelhouse and elsewhere. She directs the MFA program in creative writing at Chatham University, where she is Executive Editor of The Fourth River, a journal of nature and place-based writing. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA, with her family.
