insides in - flipside B - Barbara LM Handley

insides in

In Harry's world, the time turner makes it
possible to live two lives
or more in one moment.

My time turner twists my world into a
moebius strip so I never leave the moments
that broke me.

I live in the eternal now. Why could it not
have been a moment of laughter,
plunging down the hill on
the toboggan and shooting across
the road, or flying, flying
while my daddy swung me round and
round?

So little, it takes so little to turn
these days into those days.
A word, a tone, a smell
and I'm trapped in Dorothy's
hourglass with the witch.

Again, I am five, furled
around my bear, my soft brown
bear. Already his neck had torn and
I'd stuffed a doily in the hole to keep
his insides in. To keep my insides
in. Oh, I loved him fierce, knowing that he,
alone in all the world, loved me back. He
absorbed all my tears.

My mother threw him away when I was 12.
I miss him. Left only with myself, hunched
hollow around the space I say is empty
because it never fills, no matter how
much I feed on the chunks and gobbets
of my own sorrow.

I curl like paper smoldering too near
the fire, bending until my elbows lock into my
hips, cold fingers tremulous against my shoulders,
wrists crossed, bound. I press my forehead, my
nose, my mouth against my knee, aching for
warm and loving flesh not my own.

2005

Thoughts and Comments

I performed this piece at the May Poetry Slam Finals in Eugene.

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Contact Barbara Handley at mailto:ardea@flipsideb.com