Myka Kielbon 

When I was new, I entered a small room in a small house up on a hill and full of light. Everything was temporary, not clean, but un-dirtied. The weather was of time never passing. The weather is like this a lot now, this time where everything rushes past. How I tell the story now the weather had never been like that before. I was body-only, I put on my boots and went to work. I painted a white wall white again.


The clouds split. The sky was too blue and I flew across town in a car with broken brakes. Nothing ended badly, only because nothing ended.


I entered the room again to find a dead fox, a dead dog, stuffed, still, standing, no smell. I was not like them. I could come and go, make mistakes. This, I chose to do. Miss-taking. I was not so good at going. That choice was made for me. Still, I was given promise, so much of it, and for years it cursed me like formaldehyde, cool whiff of future held at arm’s length. Nothing was promised to me, nothing like what I wanted, the craftsman’s sure removal of my guts.

I imagine you worry
about what I want
and what you can’t
give me. And lately
I dream to be monkish
about love. Maybe
that means I am
hiding. When something
is hidden, do you get to keep it
like a secret? Hot on the neck?
If only I could be granted
the privilege of an
undershirt. A way to be
so close to you.

Myka Kielbon is the lead producer of the poetry podcast The Slowdown. Her work in multiple disciplines has appeared with LAist, KCRW, the Altadena Poetry Review, High Noon, Feast, Blind Landing, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles.