Not even if is a wildfire in close enough range. Not even the present is within breath. For years the answers came, the same answer, or not the same at all, spotted in a different tongue, then none at all. The soft filling of the future tense that would not fit into a grid, one I could name. And right in the midpoint of what I thought was mid- life, a new character padded onto the page. Who traveled from the long after. Leaking the afterlife. And all that year, I couldn’t read, knowing language could be directional, drawing close. Moving away. But the character was recurring, then the main figure. His mouth loaded, the bababa. Between his diaphragm and hard palate: phonic vibration and smear. Strained visage behind my 37th year. And how did we get here—you and I, I mean. My child whose modifiers I tend and prune on the screen. You were a no and then one of ten thousand things arising in the mind’s snow. Stay, you bid me, stay. And from that point on there was no question laid and there I was, now dragged by the endless itching of the clock’s hands, around and around the now, now, now. Was there ever a chase? It’s getting late. I shiver, touching you here on the page.
This poem appears in the June 2026 print edition.
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