In the forest each leaf was a color and I held it and it glowed and I remembered my love of orange.

I am trying to figure out how a poem can have abstraction—irregular square or perfect triangle of light.

I made a photocopy and my hand appeared.

If I were diligent I'd look up and include here how a photocopy differs from a photograph,
but I am no longer diligent.

It's not that color is abstract, it's that color is personal and we pretend.

I set out to write a moody poem and here are the old obsessions: water, the pounds of it required to make paper, the opacity of my own desires.

A ritual asks me to throw a clay world to the ground, so I do.

I am told what I already know, but also the mechanism of the desert's steep changes in temperature.

A desert holds no water in its air, has no buffer of specific heat.

“Fate” is a concept that has some appeal for me.

I am in the middle of a reckoning—that this concept might also be dangerous.

There are many things I was sure of that became impermanent—boyfriends, the category “boy” at all.

I briefly kept a dream journal, but it turns out that if you start paying attention to your dreams you will actually remember them.

I felt only frightened, only more restless.

As the sun rose I turned away, made small movements to quiet the mind. 

I threw out the entire journal, each recorded fear.

The word “each” is another old obsession, how it names individuals yet holds them together.

But it is, sonically, an ugly word.

Each companion falling off the path as trellis, as soft sound.

Calling an ending certain does not quiet the feelings along the way.

The oldest obsession—how what was blank instead fills, disorients.

Published October 4th, 2020

S. Brook Corfman is the author of the poetry collections My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites, chosen by Cathy Park Hong for the Fordham POL Prize, and Luxury, Blue Lace, chosen by Richard Siken for the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, as well as three chapbooks including Frames (Belladonna* Books). In 2019 they won the Tupelo Quarterly Open Prose Prize judged by Danielle Dutton, and in 2020 a scholarly essay was published in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. @sbrookcorfman & sbrookcorfman.com

Rachel Eulena Williams is a New York based artist from Miami. With a BFA from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Williams has been an artist-in-residence at NY Studio Factory in Brooklyn, 68 Projects in Berlin, and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in Manhattan. Williams’ work has been shown in New York, Austin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Canada, France, and Sweden. Her most recent exhibition with Cooper Cole Gallery, Hey Mars, can be viewed online. Williams’ piece ‘Water ring’ is available through Canada Gallery, with the proceeds going to the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition.