On walking alone after respectable hours

“I think clapping is how hands mourn.” – Bob Hicok

I find my path through strangers – in murky twilights,
alleys of broken glass.
I tell the time by the drift of coal smoke over
a soiled moon.

I think alone
is when the streets have mouths, the chimneys,
ears. The gurgle of sewage through rusty pipes
is the throb of blood in fevered veins.
Midnight inverts the shadows, and I think I seize
a feeling in my fingers that is dampness – the seeping sweat
left over from troubled
sleep.

I have not slept untouched since nights
too dulled now to recall.

I think alone
is when the distant clock, hoisted high in a tower
like a glorified damsel held hostage to stars,
strikes an hour too late
for shining knights to be abroad.
I think alone is startling – the swift exposure,
like sheets snatched from naked
limbs.

The knowledge of our own vulnerability,
which should be instinctual
as the day we’re born,
instead comes sharp, and hard, and we flinch
as if from something
undeserved.

What does anyone deserve?
Anyone could walk where my feet have fallen—
I would be no better, nor any worse,
and neither would they.

I have learned one thing,
if anything,
that smoke and rain and rusted walls
divine no difference.

Charissa Roberson is a student of Creative Writing at Roanoke College. Her previous work has finalized in the Lex Allen Literary Festival at Hollins University and been published in Roanoke College's student literary magazine. She currently lives in Maryland with her golden retriever, Aoife.