Our Struggle

by Lesley Graham

January sun spits its wan ray, pokes at something 
held over from six wordy seasons of faux intimacy 
with Karl Ove Knausgaard — an image hidden in the 
hand-me-down detritus of his struggle. Pale toddlers
wrangled into snowsuits for an outing to the Co-op, 
sullied coffee cups, an affront to virility endlessly 
polished, a piss-sodden sofa of seventies brown check: the
petty annoyances of his life that I’ll carry for the rest of mine, 
crockery, clutter, clumsiness. My head is flooded with places 
I have not been and yet know, filled with people I have not met 
and yet know. I am thankful all the same for the gift of a 
never-seen slant of light on an unfamiliar fjord, for darkness 
outside the window heaving like an ocean.
Winter settles in, hankering for a memory that is all mine.