Tricia Knoll

 
I am Broken / 
Heart
 
Line breaks have a bad rep: wildfire flames lick over the crest of the Pasadena hillsides. Firefighters breathe plastics and melted tires. Here in Vermont line breaks mean power outages. Wind. Snow too heavy for trees to hold up their heads. Pick-up-stick trees crossing down wires along the unplowed two-lane road to some small village. In the kitchen, cold soup. Grabbed candles that smell of tea tree, bergamot, and soy wax. A dead lamp where I want to read police procedural mysteries. No light over my mirror. A nine-battery flashlight.  The rhythm for the line? I’m the Mimer Clapper in the gospel service that waits for someone else to clap first so I can dance and clap with them. Someone always goes first. On the beat. As for poetry, I faked my way through a master’s degree as if I could parse rhythms other than iambic. Even now I break an adjective from its noun. 
 
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Lace on Sunday
 
I wake up as lace. Like fresh snow that lines every twig. No black or scarlet mantillas. Handmade. Like the tablecloth my mother crocheted when she was pregnant with me, nine months of forever. Her work fits the longest dinner table I’ve ever seen. I’ve washed red wine stains from it. Beef blood. Blue birthday cake frosting. Now I’m white lace. Too old for lingerie, weddings or baptisms. I am intricacy, open spaces, and symmetry – inklings of what to expect in complex knots. I will not surround a neck like Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s signature collar to remind everyone she was a woman – not a person of coat and tie, a person of lace. Imagine how I felt to realize I am only slightly bigger than a doily. An antimacassar sized to protect the back of a chair from male hair oil. Unacceptable! I reinvent myself.  I am prayer flag hung on a tree to let wind taste lace, wash with rain. I flutter in the breeze until longing spreads. Til I unravel.
 
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Cosmic Latte
 
Astronomers at Johns Hopkins studied 200,000 galaxies. They determined cosmic latte is the average color of the universe in stars, galaxies, clouds of dust and gas.  To be specific: HEX #FFF8E7 if you want to dip your computer’s eyedropper into it and fill your image. Think Milky Way. Color of great espresso stirred with cream. No cinnamon on top. Sugar optional. I can’t overstate how comforting I found this. Fleshed out with the hums and whirs of espresso machines, the shuffling feet of people waiting for a paper cup with a siren wearing a crown to appear on the counter with their initials on it. When an endless night of beyond falls below the horizon, each sip feeds a star nature.
 
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The Immortelles
 
Three story ingredients: man, horse and death. Siddhartha rode the white stallion Kinthaka when he escaped from the palace and left the horse behind on his path to the lotus and enlightenment. Kinthaka’s heart broke – to be reborn in what was said to be a heaven.  
 
Ulysses S. Grant, horse whisperer, and his famed stallion Cincinnati. Grant rode Cincinnati to the Appomatox Courthouse to negotiate General Lee’s surrender. He allowed Abraham Lincoln to ride Cincinnati, breaking his rule that no one else rode the magnificent horse. Grant died in 1885 of throat cancer in his cottage in Moreau, New York three days after completing a memoir he hoped would provide funds for his impoverished wife and family. His son stopped the clock at 8:08. The U.S. Grant Cottage National Landmark preserves decorations from his funeral – bouquets of immortelles, pearly everlastings, a six-foot floral gate, a cross and a sword. Blooms browned with time, tinged with grime. 
 
Friends of Grant Cottage who seek to preserve those floral arrangements study how. Spray glue? Wax? Replicas? Switch to framed photos? 
 
How long does a story last? See Buddha and Kinthaka painted on silk scrolls and carved on stupas. Alexander the Great and Bucephalus grace a mosaic from Pompeii, coins and sculptures and a Degas painting. Grant and Cincinnati in paintings. Roy Rogers’ taxidermied Trigger rears up in the John Wayne Museum.  
 
The Buddha said what rises also ceases. Lotus. Bread. Storm. Shadow. Mountain. Flood. Fire. Breath. Friends, followers and flowers for the dead. 
 
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The Ark of Words
 
When scientists determine what to put in the next ark launched to save us, I hope there’s room for all languages, even almost-dead ones. Including words for corn or water disputed in footnotes. Once even tea enflamed war. Poems hidden in a cloud with no water vapor. The ship’s manifest may trail out as long as the scribe’s beard. On the loading dock, may a stevedore separate words that float from what doesn’t, what needs cotton buffers in an oak chest, is glass-fragile or soft as baby flesh. After linguists separate love from loss, war from military operations, what’s renamed as original. Then let longshoremen shift the weight onboard. Some words will get tucked into crannies with fudgel, snollygoster and woofit, too good to lose. Others share wisdom from ten thousand languages – mother, kindness, mercy, justice– even their variants of abuse. Lies aspire to be the ship’s figurehead until they fall off, food for the dragonfish. Where the ship sails, its ports of call, what flag it flies, we can speculate. If the ship sinks, let its treasure float off to wings of the ever-flying albatross and gentle dove, wind, rain, stars, and a following sea. 
 
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Pulling Down the Stars
 
On the first cold midnight in October, I stare into the cloudless sky at star glitter. I want to see the smudge of Comet Lemmon as it zooms by and away for the next 1,350 years. Let this night sky plant a dream seed. Pull down the space frontier. Excite a sleep spindle.  Hook a sparkle from Orion’s belt into my ear lobe. But during tonight’s REM I yank the letter A off a dark-red marquee resting in the dusty backlot of a resale store. An antique sign hauled from a theater now retrofitted as a brewery. The salesperson said I couldn’t take the A; someone might want the whole sign which reads THE WAY THE WORLD ENDS.  I don’t know why I want only the A. I’ve aged beyond my Scarlet Letter irritation at Reverend Dimmesdale. But the blue sub-giant star Algenib marks where Pegasus’ wing rubs his hindquarters, the bareback seat. Bridling up to ride the wild stallion: relive a blue-ribbon ending to my race, drink the Milky Way. Let his hooves strike up lightning. My what’s-up ache to fly beyond the bitter first frost. To the edge of asylum, the boundaries where angels applaud, tomorrow’s awestruck.  
 
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To The Motherboard on Our Mother Ship
 
Please. Power up with sunshine to share your memory of antidotes for the grievous mistakes the captains of our earth ship make. Share the  wisdom of gentle goddesses known and unknown. The She who heals mothers and children. Who softens mourning. Brings the lost home. Guards against scorpions, restores life to the gardens in Gaza, cradles babies and gives them bread. Start way back. All the Mary’s. Ask us to give Oshun gifts of honey and oranges for blessings. Help me name whose hand rests on my shoulder when I get stuck in cul-de-sacs of rubble, quack grass, and broken promises. Help me breathe into the Pieta’s grief. Loan me Antigone as my nails scratch droughted soil to bury the dread of love lost in onboard leadership mutinies. Offer us more than war-torn and refugees. Guanyin’s compassion. St. Brigid of poetry. The vision of Lakshmi. Urge us to right this ship and withstand the crash that looms under our star. Be AI-leen, voicing patterns and predictions that lead to hopepunk. Use the widest possible interpretation of ancestor to define action. Translate what the whales have been saying for millions of years. Shift, sift and splice something that shimmers in this creeping darkness. Help. Now. 
 
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Tricia Knoll’s The Unknown Daughter was a finalist in the 2025 New England Poetry Club chapbook contest. More than 300 of her poems have appeared in journals as diverse as Kenyon Review and New Verse News and nine collections, full-length or chapbook. Wild Apples, out in 2024 from Fernwood Press, details downsizing with aging and moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont. After 18 years of working with free verse, she is now writing mostly prose poems. She serves as a Contributing Editor to the online journal Verse Virtual. Website: triciaknoll.com