Tangle by Emily Jo Scalzo

Two heavy solid wood doors,

painted a chipped sea-green,

stand fifty feet apart

on one wall of the basement.

Old iron doorknobs protest

when turned, and a pull-string

I’m too short to reach

is the only source of light.

The root cellar is just a hallway

lined with wooden shelves,

but is a place of nightmares

to my six-year-old self.

At night, asleep, I find myself inside,

the door through which I entered gone,

grope in the dank at shelves

lined with jars and spider webs,

searching for the other door.

Instead, the hallway stretches

into a dusty labyrinth,

unending and terrifying.

Poppy finds me there,

tearstained and dirty,

by the soft glow

of his cigarette lighter.

Outside the dream,

he’s three hours away,

suffering from Alzheimer’s—

in his own kind of darkness.

But in my dreams he knows

we are lost, that it’s us two

against the void and the maze

beneath my childhood home.

I always woke before we could escape;

the next nightmare he’d find me again,

and we kept searching for the egress,

the lighter flame slowly dying.

His darkness claimed him when I was ten,

and now I wander the labyrinth alone,

wonder if Poppy escaped the black

or if his light flickered out

and he’s still lost down here,

far deeper than I can reach.

Emily Jo Scalzo holds an MFA in fiction from California State University-Fresno and is an assistant teaching professor at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Her work has appeared in various magazines including Midwestern Gothic, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Blue Collar Review, New Verse News, and others. Her first chapbook, The Politics of Division, was published in 2017 and awarded honorable mention in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards in 2018.