Knuckle Down/ Pull

KNUCKLE DOWN (Pull)

by Laurel

The guitar shrank
beneath her hands.
The flickering muscles of
each arm (earned with labor)
were the music.
Clenched and sweaty and flying,
pushing blistered fingers up
and pulling strings,
rowing through the song,
cutting history with two
paddles of melody—
a feigned control over
a current of ghosts.

The woman understands water,
I've heard it rushing through
her music, the rain so loud
and rhythmic leaving everything
it touches glistening and wet.

The morning rises to
a sleepless woman
embracing hollow wood:
beating it, begging it,
willing it to sing,
to cry out an anguish
those calloused lips almost
forgot. It is only indignation
and innate desire that pull her
alone with that guitar,
which shrinks beneath
the mass of her small body,
the mass of her weathered fury.

Alone with that guitar,
imagine her rocking in shadows,
through them as the sun
pulls the grey vertically across
her floor, her furniture, her hands
speckled with light.

Or maybe it's the other way round—
the palms lure a song out of the hollow
in a fluttering dance of fingertips—
but I believe it simply is.
The guitar breathes with her
breast, her blood whispers to it,
becoming the backbone of her thought
then shrinking, as the words
come to