Angela Arnold
The House Knows
It remembers every creak on the stairs,
she says, pronouncing it crick, and
he nods, amiable, alarmed.
Always he stands there, she points:
and obediently he waits for it
to vanish, disperse into the now foreign quiet.
She pauses herself,
her still pointing finger sinking, slowly, expecting.
He feels a tug then, of something, at something –
not in his body (fluttering
of the heart, churning gut, clenched chest)
but in some other long lost region,
barely retrievable in that other tongue.
This spook now rummaging
in his boy’s memory bank
evidently – without asking consent; a snatcher
of old keys, a strangler of consequences.
He battles his way to disbelief, ignores the pain,
the poking about in a haze of no-recollection.
Come now, he says at last and pleads her
away, on to the final grating
sound of the lock. Neither of them looking
as something stays behind.
Angela Arnold
Angela Arnold lives in North Wales, UK, and is also an artist, a creative gardener and an environmental campaigner. Her poems have appeared in print magazines, anthologies and online, in the UK and elsewhere. Her collection In|Between, about ‘inner landscapes’ and relationships, was published by Stairwell Books in April 2023. She enjoys her synaesthesia and language/s and is currently learning Welsh. Twitter @AngelaArnold777