Paint it black. The devil’s been known to darken a door. I’ve been alone like a rat carcass in a crowd of crows. Illegible to the morning sun. Heavier than the word “forlorn.” We're minimalist mammals with puny fucking headlamps, editing “through the night” and “after the fact,” along the pin-thin balance beam of the present’s underbelly. Rafting down a steady stream of piss. Swerving around the yellow line in the center of I-90. It’s aesthetic desolation. Old Testament shit. The universe’s so, so, cold, and luck be a stray bolt of lightning. Like they say. There ain’t no telling. To want to live is to be vivisected, and we allow ourselves vivisecting, nonetheless. Writers and readers, like algae blooms congregating on the blank page, like a self help meeting for melancholic human centipedes. The poem is a safe place to confess, to process, to proclaim, to hone the fleeting, flaming, moment, however tragic, into a monument of necessary ash. Path of Totality by Niina Pollari (Soft Skull Press, 2022).
