Marks by Karen Friedland

It takes many years
for fingerprints to form
in odd places around the house—

where your husband clutches
at the newel post, say,
on his way down the stairs.

But the marks suddenly appear one sunny day—
above light switches and around door knobs and frames,
so you scrub the years-worth of dead skin and newspaper ink away,

knowing all the while they’re a talisman—
a sign of us having been here, in this house,
of having lived at all.

And I look forward,
years from now,
to having the pleasure again
of scrubbing them away.



A nonprofit grant writer by day, Karen Friedland’s poems have been published in Nixes Mate Review, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Lily Poetry Review, Vox Populi and others. Her book of poems, Places That Are Gone, was published in 2019 by Nixes Mate Books, and she has a chapbook forthcoming in late 2020 from Cervena Barva Press. She lives in Boston with her husband, two cats and two dogs.