from the forthcoming collection, Wait/Loss, this is “Sentence ’86”:

in all of time coming and going, whatever’s next and long before now, before this millennium, or the last, before the Dark Ages, before Jesus, Christ, even before time, we share these years, you and I, this splinter of nanoseconds as we tumble through space in this brief awareness, together, share these histories, these stories, that pandemic, that eruption, the wars, the towers tumbling, the time we stayed up all night looking at stars, and the time we said goodbye that hot summer day, that was us back then, over there, when somehow we got caught onto each other as the accident of now determined that in all of everything that ever was and might be somehow we should share this present, hooked, for just a while, then not, and billions of others and billions more were, are, and will be, so you have to know that the chances remain incomprehensible that we might ever collide at all, leaving pieces of each other in the other’s pockets to carry on some wayward journey through space, and, then, gone again, evaporated into that eternal foreverness of nevermore, so brief, so tragically beautiful yet sadistically brief is this whirlwind of now, so I must wonder what the odds are in the vastness of this expanding thought, that we’d collide yet again, so that here we are, somehow