Moving Home​

1st Place in the Poetry Writing Contest

Issue 18

I didn’t know panic attacks
                        could last months, pulling
the hairs of everyday acts,
                        like nestling fish filets
in spitting oil or spreading
                        peanut butter on Saltines--
shrill joints, trembling muscles,
                        and repeated expectations
that the move-in would settle into normal
                        chaos, and not be the hurricane
that seeds its own storms,
                        the essential eye
not holding. I thought the ranch
                        layout would be fine, as my husband
and I’d adapted to many styles
                        during five decades,
but it’s too tight and paneled too,
                        and my breath
comes short and shorter.
                        I turn left at hall’s end
into my bedroom (like then)
                        same high, narrow, windows, begrudging sight
and distance, if not light.
                        The hall dragged me to my dolls
and my sisters’ toys jumbled
                        in the low white cart
which Dad had built
                        and which I imagine
at hall’s end like then,
                        where I laid my dolls’
faces up to breathe,
                        holding my breath, stifling tremors
so no one could stop me--
                        this rescuing
a precursor to years of nightmares
                        of my failures
to save my family
                        from fire, flood, or bombs.
Now, lungs ramp,
                        and I grab air, grasping
for the coping woman
                        I’d become but which lies
flopped forward

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TERRIE JOPLIN taught English in public schools in Washington, Illinois, and North Carolina, and holds an MS in Education and a National Board Certification. Her poems appear in Door is a Jar, MER Online Folio, ONE ART, SWWIM Every Day, The Westchester Review, the anthology Recovering Greenness, and elsewhere. Terrie and her husband reside with their multi-generational family and four tuxedo cats in New York. She enjoys gardening, painting, and road trips to geographical wonders.

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