Adabel Fixes a Crack
It trickles across the kitchen wall. Plaster cracking and peeling. She buys Plaster of Paris, a trowel rolls up her sleeves and draws up a pair of old woolen trousers ties a kerchief over her hair. She recalls frosting her sister’s wedding cake, beating eggs until her arms ached, the importance of making a crumb coating. The time her husband broke his arm against a cutlass, the cast the doctor wrapped onto his elbow as she held the lantern aloft, not trembling as a lady in a novel might have, swooning over her love. She mounts the three-legged stool with knife in hand. She teeters as she cuts away the detritus, scrapes away what is old. She takes up the trowel the zinc pail full of plaster. She doesn’t know a crack is merely a symptom. A crack is an inlet of a greater ocean, heaving.
Kristin LaTour’s first full-length collection, What Will Keep Me Alive, is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2015. Her most recent chapbook is Agoraphobia, from Dancing Girl Press(2013). Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Fifth Wednesday, Cider Press Review, Escape into Life, and Massachusetts Review, and in the anthology Obsession: Sestinas in the 21st Century. She teaches at Joliet Jr. College and lives in Aurora, IL with her writer husband, a lovebird, and two dogitos. Readers can find more information at www.kristinlatour.com.
