from "eight poems of reconciliation"

The space in paintings is not paint; it is space.
Cole Swensen, The Glass Age

I know there are men in the distance.
The trees at the edge of the woods

are sacrificing one another.
Paige Ackerson-Kiely, In No One's Land

a name, etched in, is made of gravity.

I call you, let you wake
into the contours of my voice,

uncertain hours.
a penance, twinned.

this difficult birth.

it is useless to believe in light

unless blind, & then
you know.

kissed Morse Code
across the dash.

you don't have to shape a distance
to walk a flight of stairs.

the poem doesn't have to be difficult.
the poem doesn't.

there is nothing stranger than what
we almost recognize.