Padlock
Michelle McMillan-Holifield
Padlock
Corrosion mosses and frays metal, turning
the impregnable padlock into a mishmash mosaic.
A mixed-media work of art. Fingers jumble
a miasma of steel chips unmoored into the air.
Fingerprints—fiery lurching of human contact. Lock, safely
packed beneath overgrowth, now thrust uncamouflaged
after decades of concealment. Human hands feel artificial,
unseemly, leaden with meddlesome tendencies
striving to overtake this locked lair where all secrets are laid bare.
The journey to this place was toilsome. Path matted
with unmalleable barriers: All. Barricades.
There he goes to open it, the mournful groom.
And she, the gone ghost, afraid that when the lock unbolts,
her hiding place and all its strongholds
will be exposed, splayed like an open chest
cradling the marble of her heart.
Michelle McMillan-Holifield is a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. Her work has been included in or is forthcoming in Boxcar Poetry Review, Nelle, Sky Island Journal, Stirring, The Collagist, The Main Street Rag, Whale Road Review, and Windhover, among others. She hopes you one day find her poetry tacked to a tree somewhere in the Alaskan Wild.