Uncertainty

    by Christine Klocek-Lim

She watches herself in the fogged quiet

of the bathroom mirror: worn skin, eyes that look

away before she can perceive their true color.

Because she knows that dying can sometimes skew

perception, she listens for echoes. The quiet voices

of her grandchildren filter through the closed door,

arguing about the sky, how its great blue expanse

must be infinite despite the limits of atmosphere

and vision. And she remembers her mother

insisting that god decides what a woman can bear

but she no longer believes, understanding how

the faucet leaks silence into the drain as her hands,

soft now with age, tremble above the hole, cupping

the flow with uncertainty.

© 2010 Christine Klocek-Lim

Christine Klocek-Lim received the 2009 Ellen La Forge Memorial Prize in poetry and was a finalist in Nimrod’s 2006 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She has two chapbooks: How to photograph the heart (The Lives You Touch Publications, November 2009) and The book of small treasures (Seven Kitchens Press, March 2010). Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, OCHO, Poets and Artists (O&S), The Pedestal Magazine, Terrain.org, the anthology Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired by String Theory, Touch: The Journal of Healing, and elsewhere. She is editor of Autumn Sky Poetry, serves on the Board of Directors for The Externalist—A Journal of Perspectives, and her website is www.novembersky.com.