Step by Step by Kara Knickerbocker

my older brother teaches me about fear
with my belly close to the cool stone
in the midst of an August day, clinging
to the rocky cliff buried in the woods
on the side of the deep canyon
back behind our neighbor’s house
where we’d gone to explore, for the first time,
together. It had been his idea to scale
the steep surface and, not wanting to appear
like a girl, or a baby, but for once, his equal,
I climbed after him, trying to retrace his steps
but the navy blue splash of his gym shorts
was already waves ahead of where I was,
bringing swift sickness when I looked up.
I became paralyzed with fear, my left hand
dumb in one crevice, my right sweating
into the sharpness of another. There was nowhere
to step, even if I could uproot my feet. Already
at the top, he shouted down to me directions
for a space to grip, pointed corners jutting out,
something to hold to, but I could not move.
It was then he lowered himself down the face of the wall
until he reached me, left foot here, he instructed,
it’s okay, he said, and I shifted into trust, as step
by step, like a method for living, we pulled ourselves
from the gorge below, back on common ground.



The author of the chapbooks The Shedding Before the Swell (dancing girl press, 2018) and Next to Everything that is Breakable (Finishing Line Press, 2017), Kara Knickerbocker's work has appeared in or is forthcoming from: Poet Lore, HOBART, The Dallas Review, among others. She currently lives in Pennsylvania and writes with the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University. Find her online: www.karaknickerbocker.com.