Kristen Holt-Browning

Kristen Holt-Browning’s chapbook, The Only Animal Awake in the House, was the runner-up in Moonstone Press’s 2021 Annual Chapbook Contest. She was also a finalist in the Kelsay Books 2022 Women’s Poetry Contest. She holds an MA in English from University College London and lives in Beacon, New York, where she works as a freelance editor.

All the Way Down

I remember an early fall in this slick baby of a house. I was all twitch and whisker,
exhausted, my hands full of your new body. You used to love this story, asked for
it often: the uncarpeted staircase, my missed step, the tumble, you still in my arms,
unscathed all the way down. Years later, in this weird and pale January, I still feel
guilty, mostly about all this weather. And I’m tired, too, of the quirks of language,
such as when you ask, what’s a heatwave? Could it drown us? You ask for bedtime
stories about water, but I still think in terms of stone. In the morning, you leave
again and I spend hours opening and closing doors and windows. You return
full of black holes, of silent vowels and new math, releasing volcanoes from
your tongue, telling me meteors are not rare. I’m more interested in maintaining
this little kingdom, weak simulation of heaven on earth. The wall of pine trees,
stark and needled, unnatural border. Our bodies of water have no firm edges.
You’re an expanding map I want to follow. Someday, you’ll leave this house.
I’m still a project of bones, tissue. Someday, a ghost nestled in your mouth.