Drifting, she passes through the frame.
Reshapes borders, edges.
The way smoke scribes a letter in the sky with
gases and particulates. Intractable. Impermanent.
But not like a risen corpse
yet to accept its body’s stilling, or
the flooded creek’s waters taking
a house and the family within. Some things
are explainable. This morning you drained
the sink, and thunder set off a neighbor’s alarm.
From every moment, a second emerges.
Picture a man lighting a candle where a home once stood.
Robert Okaji lives in Texas. The author of five chapbooks, most recently I Have a Bird to Whistle (Luminous Press, 2019), his work has appeared or is forthcoming in North Dakota Quarterly, Subterranean Blue, Vox Populi, Panoply and elsewhere.