Borrowed Light
Every time the lights cut,
the eight-year-old in me speaks first:
maybe that’s all we get.
We had a good run.
We used it all up.
The house drops its small habits—
the fridge stops telling weather,
clocks fold their numbers,
outlets close their twin mouths.
In the window, the block becomes a study in guesses.
Someone calls hello into the dark
like it’s a hallway that might answer.
We find the matches. The room remembers fire.
Faces get honest. We wait.
What breaks first?
Not the big ideas, I think, but the little hinges:
the card reader at the bodega,
the pump that lifts water to the tenth floor,
the red eye that keeps insulin night-cold,
the fan at the foot of a hospital bed,
the tower that turns voices into air.
How long before sirens are just trucks,
before cash is king again and the king is out of town,
before the stoplights grow eyes of stone?
We had a good run—
laundromat moons, stadium noon at midnight,
a heater that ticks itself awake,
a stair light guarding small feet,
servers in locked rooms muttering weather for the market,
the open sign’s pink blessing,
a chair lifting an elder to standing.
We reached into the jar without counting,
coin by glowing coin.
Candles recruit the old arts:
listening, naming, carrying without light.
A cooler thuds up from the basement.
Someone knocks to ask if we need ice.
On the stoop, strangers exchange batteries, bread, news.
We practice being a city without its plug,
and the practice feels like both rehearsal and warning.
If this is the stop—the last stop—
could we hold?
Would the sky come back with its difficult stars,
would we map the street by footsteps,
learn each neighbor by the shape of their cough,
pull water from the park pump and share it,
keep vigil for machines with lungs?
How long could we keep from choosing the worst in us?
I am not sure. The question hums in the walls that do not hum.
Then, without ceremony, a lamp across the street
remembers itself. The fridge clears its throat.
A baseboard clicks like a pen.
The router coughs a green pulse.
On the stove, 12:00 begins its slow catechism.
We don’t cheer. We look around
as if caught taking more than our share.
Maybe that’s all we get, the thought returns—
not the light, exactly, but this reprieve
riding the public wires to our private rooms.
Take it, I tell myself. Spend it better:
on bread, on elders and infants, on study, on song,
on the lamp in the stair, the battery in the drawer,
on learning the names of the people next door—
so when the long dark comes (if it comes),
we are more than appliances going quiet,
we are a circle of hands,
keeping what can be kept.
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Brandon McNeice is a Philadelphia-based educator and writer of fiction, poetry, and essays. His work appears or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, Plough, Front Porch Republic, Beyond Words, One Art, The Rush Magazine, and Flash Frog.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 