local_library Early Onset

by Spencer Smith

Published in Issue No. 248 ~ January, 2018

Postal workers deliver dangling conversations

between people of infinite patience.

 

I attempt to read the letter over the signature

of someone I once knew, or think I knew,

 

feeling my mind cool and crackle at the thought,

as if a slow flow of magma

 

has encysted the question I asked long ago,

and I can no longer break inside

 

without the inevitable shattering

into a spray of disconnected pebbles,

 

an archipelago of meaning that will not coalesce

into a piece of land large enough to land upon,

 

large enough to grasp and exclaim,

This—this is what I was attempting to recall.

 

So I am left island-hopping,

a hopeful pirate searching for a late-alphabet burial,

 

making do with the occasional glint of coin

plucked out of the sand in anticipation,

 

only to find a superscription long worn down

and a profile no longer familiar.

 

account_box More About

Spencer Smith is a University of Utah graduate and works in the corporate world to pay the bills that poetry doesn’t pay (i.e., all of them). His work has appeared in over forty literary journals, including Main Street Rag, Potomac Review, Plainsongs, RHINO, and Roanoke Review.