Arriving at the Edge

of a mind, I knocked twice on a door
that might have been a wall,
painted to look like a door. If it opened,
the mind was mine, and I was
free to make a home among the illusions
of cracks that were really crevices
leading nowhere in particular. If it remained
shut, the mind was a mine,
an illustrious trap set to explode at my touch,
which would also make it mine,
I guess, though in a temporary trespassing
kind of way. So I stood, fist raised like a gun,
aimed at a frame I might enter
or shatter, and I realized as the wind came
to coerce the initial contact
between flesh and focal metaphor
of stability, that in the end, follow-through
was really all that mattered.

A.J. Huffman has published twelve solo chapbooks and one joint chapbook through various small presses. Her new poetry collections, Another Blood Jet (Eldritch Press), A Few Bullets Short of Home (mgv2>publishing), Butchery of the Innocent (Scars Publications), Degeneration (Pink Girl Ink) and A Bizarre Burning of Bees (Transcendent Zero Press) are now available from their respective publishers and amazon.com. She is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, a two-time Best of Net nominee, and has published over 2400 poems in various national and international journals, including Labletter, The James Dickey Review, Bone Orchard, EgoPHobia, and Kritya. She is also the founding editor of Kind of a Hurricane Press. http://www.kindofahurricanepress.com.