The Tool Shed
by Kasey Jueds
published in Superstition Review
How can I explain the way
I kept coming back—to that box
of trapped shadows with its concrete
floor, its constant chill even
on the most blazing August days. To
the stacked cans of paint with their stuck-shut lids
like the eyes of animals burrowed
in the farthest reach of forest. To the locked-in
air trembling, dense with the chemicals
that fumed from ancient bottles of pesticides & herbicides
lining the cinderblock walls, exhaling their pure
dream of destruction into the unbending
dim. Inside that room that was never
a room, I offered my clavicles, my soft heels
pale as milkweed silk, to the trowels, the shears
dulled with rust. It wasn’t enough. And after,
outside, released into heat and the bright net
the barn swallows kept threading with their flight, the warped door
finally pulled shut behind me—even then that smell
stung my throat, my lungs, lingered in the hollows of me
like a shame I could never tell. And
after, years after, when we’d paid a man to haul
the poisons away, their scent still cleaved to corners, thrashed
its wings against the false dusk like an angel
unable to speak of the next world, weaving
her impossible life between the broken
croquet mallets, the rope strands of the hammock
meant to bear our bodies above the clamor
of summer grass. There is no away. Now, I want to say
come back there with me, though every time I stepped
into that place I was alone. And every time, the angel
receded into air so thick it could almost
claim a color. She was old and I
was young still, and still I knew
how she would cling there, how I’d
never see her, how she would never
let me go, even as I tugged the swollen door
back again into its frame, as I struggled
to make it fit, to return
the perfect darkness to itself.
