Tears
slide up
my cheeks into
their ducts, your playlist
reappearing, as if you are still
alive. The heat condenses coffee
back into my mug, poems pour into
my brain, your Facebook profile Un-
memorialized. I sign no lease in Brooklyn,
do not accept the life you envision for me without you
because I am with you still and it turns out there’s no need
for treatment, the FOLFOX withdrawn, vials of blood injected
in the port near your clavicle, scalpel sealing skin, there’s no shock,
there’s no need to talk to a doctor about your stomach pains, non-
existent. Your belongings fresh on your rehab bed, your dad has come
to return you to me in San Francisco, we do not break up, again, you
get thrown into a bar spit whiskey into a dozen shot glasses walk back
to our apartment where you watch jokes and flubs, music videos, trailers
for movies that haven’t been released yet as time adds to the bar across the city
in which I’ve loved you I’m tossing wine into a bin of green grapes the buds just about to break.

Published June 28, 2025

Madeleine Mori is a Japanese American writer and editor, born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poems, essays, and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, The Common, The Margins, 2022 Best New Poets (University of Virginia Press), Condé Nast Traveler, and Pleiades Magazine. The Founding Poetry Editor at Pigeon Pages, she lives in Brooklyn and is the Assistant Director of the MFA in Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, where she is the faculty advisor to Lumina Journal. She is at work on a poetry collection and a collection of essays.

Harold Edgerton was born in Fremont, Nebraska, and he received a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Nebraska. After completing a master's degree in the subject at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1927, he joined the university faculty; he was awarded a PhD in 1931. Between 1933 and 1966, Edgerton applied for forty-five patents for various strobe and electrical engineering devices. He obtained a patent for the stroboscope--a high-powered repeatable flash device--in 1949. His books include Flash! Seeing the Unseen by Ultra High-Speed Photography (1939), Electronic Flash, Strobe (1969), Moments of Vision: The Stroboscopic Revolution in Photography (1979), and Sonar Images (1986). His photographs were exhibited for the first time in 1933, at the Royal Photographic Society in London, and Beaumont Newhall included his work in the first exhibition of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in 1937. Edgerton was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1973. His work was the subject of a retrospective at the International Center of Photography, and he was given ICP's Infinity Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1987.