Kate Garrett

Unkithing

I watch the moon wax and the year wane –

concentric circles and turning gears, edges

of dawn and dusk pull each other closer

to wrap our days in an indigo cloak lined

with midnight. I stop to look across the city

from my hillside. Those lights twinkle up

at me all year long, but in the sharp night

they’ve grown spikes – in winter each life

is trimmed with ice. I’m considering mirrors.

Perhaps I don’t charge enough for manic

pixie wisdom, for happy accidents, when I

fit into this role and break out of it again –

but I still think I owe him something:

cigarettes, a drink, an apology. We still wish

on stars when the night sky is clouded over.

There is a calm in the way no expectation

follows a secret desire spoken aloud – how

it feels to wake to a world made silent by

snow. It’s a kind of disappearing: gaps in our

conversation, a stretch from hour to week

to the day when the moon enters Gemini. Then

here he is – with hands open, wearing a new tune.

 *unkithing – an old Scots word (pre-1700) meaning ‘failing to make oneself known’.

Kate Garrett is a writer, editor, mama, drummer, and history & folklore obsessive who sometimes haunts 450-year-old houses. Her poetry is widely published online and in print, and her next book, A View from the Phantasmagoria, is forthcoming from Rhythm & Bones Press in October 2020. Born and raised in rural southern Ohio, Kate moved to England in 1999, where she still lives halfway up a Sheffield hillside. www.kategarrettwrites.co.uk