A doorman guards the lobby, but no tenants live in these apartments. He guards a door that no one enters. I can’t imagine a break in. The walls would open a place where you once were, where blame escaped.
I would keep my ear to the door. Unbodied a pulse might quicken.
Perhaps then you’d listen. I’m here in the slot between every hum that lives outside, the side walk around the block and back again. A box with a false bottom, a trick, a retreat without blood, without end, a perpetual swallow.
Jean Kane’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications. Kane’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, American Short Fiction online, South Dakota Review, Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, 3:AM, Hotel Amerika, Euphony Journal, Fogged Clarity, The MacGuffin, The Nonconformist, Posit Journal, Rue Scribe, Slab, Voices de la Luna, Word For/Word, Doubly Mad, and The Courtship of Winds. Her book of poems, Make Me, was published by Otis Nebula in 2014. She is a recipient of the Otis Nebula Poetry Prize, and she was nominated for a 2021 Pushcart Prize by Hole In The Head Review.
Image: “(Not) Watching” by Nicole Monroe
Pine Hills Review 