by Neil Carpathios
A doorknob’s I.Q. in relation to other objects is below average, I suppose. But it knows something. Like how to turn its head. Without it a door is just part of the wall, and you’re trapped. I’m no Einstein but, I too, know at least something, which is more than nothing. So I’m not too insulted. In fact, I can relate: how it waits and waits to be touched, how it squeaks and makes a small sigh when squeezed and twisted. It’s not too dumb to know pleasure. A doorknob holds a mystery we’ll never enter. Get inside the universe of a doorknob’s head. Of course you can’t, nobody can, not even a psychic. A doorknob could be a genius, for all we know, silently meditating, hour after hour, on philosophical constructs of stillness, of entering and exiting, of birth and death. A doorknob might be a small bald god. Remember that the next time you touch one, whisper a prayer of gratitude as you pass from one room into another with its help, is what I want to tell her but she’s already gone.
Neil Carpathios is the author of five full-length poetry collections, most recently Confessions of a Captured Angel (Terrapin Books, 2016) and Far Out Factoids (FutureCycle Press, 2017). He also is editor of Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio (Ohio University Press, 2014). Currently, he is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio.
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