Opening

Opening

The door 
is butter yellow
and buzzing. 

It is brown and thin,
crooked like a hand to
scoop the sky. 

The door
is heat in your palm,
acid on your tongue. 

It is the knot on the top
of your left shoulder, that
hollow echo behind your heart. 

The door
trills in your ears with the
robins and wrens.

It flits,
flies,
lands again. 

The door
is a crumple of bedsheets,
the sudden
jolt
as you
fall
awake. 

The Prompt

I often have the feeling of standing at a threshold. The electric sense that this moment—though ostensibly mundane—is the culmination of everything. It’s a feeling of intense aliveness that swoops in out of nowhere. I am washing dishes, and bam, I am suddenly so alive it feels like it could kill me. Everything is significant. Everything is saturated with sensation and a sense of destiny. The world is a flower, screaming with color, calling me to its nectar. This moment, pay attention to this moment! This is what you’re here for. I feel this over and over, sometimes many times a day, occasionally for hours at a stretch. It’s gorgeous. Sometime, it’s exhausting. I’m pretty sure it makes me weird.

This poem is a reflection of this sense that I am living in a threshold. A liminal space. The first stanza took its inspiration from the patch of trail pictured above, butterweed growing on either side and the air vibrating with the sound of buzzing bees. It felt like a physical representation of this threshold that I so often feel. Golden. Illuminated. Alive. But that aliveness is everywhere—in a bare branch, a cup of coffee, in my body’s aches and pains, in birdsong, in sleep, in sudden waking.

What does the word ‘threshold’ conjure for you? How about the simpler, more everyday word ‘door’? For today’s prompt, I invite you to play with one or both of these words. Go wildly metaphorical if you’d like. Or simply tell a story—about a door in your life, maybe one that always creaks or never latches or blows open in a storm. Maybe you have multiple deadbolts on your door. Maybe you never lock it. Maybe it’s painted canary yellow. Maybe your HOA prevented that.

Is there a door that feels shut to you? Or a door that has swung wide open, but you’re rooted where you stand, deciding whether to step through?

Or maybe—bless you, dear soul—you knew exactly what I was talking about with all my mumbo jumbo about thresholds and aliveness and you, like me, are one of the wonderfully weird ones who feels so alive it’s an ache.

Where is your poem in all of this? I so look forward to reading whatever you share.