All around me, things have been leaving.

By Erin Michelle Davis



If I ever found something like that again, I would hold on to it. I know that I could.

Long stretches of nothing for days and for nights, and for hours upon hours endless.

The wanton seconds

And empty marshes where the echoes cannot even sink.

no referent to bare cause or witness-

{Q'est-ce que c'est?}

Oh, but don’t you know? You know.

Hmm (Eg: to expel-/to absorb…  to contaminate and render intelligible)

Do you know now? I think you do. You ought to- of its

{Stop it.}

Its slippery contours {Fucking stop it.}

its tale of will and of triumph and our famous “insidious intent”-

the long stretches of nothing

in coldness and in idle and even in negation-

in mirage and displacement and all that is tertiary:

I won’t let it go next time. When there is another time

I’ll tell it so, this thing I have once again found and long searched for,

that only few have touched.

How undiluted and logical it is. I’ll tell it. And make it real with words.

I will breathe into it,

and lose my desire to leave the ragged gnawing

that pervaded its structures.

Then bound them to return.