The Future Has Poetry: “How I Tell You I Love You When All Hope Is Lost” by Jeneva Stone

Displaced air arrives by force as the metro rushes the station. Your hand pressed to the small of my back and dim lights up my spine brighten north. Greens tied with a pink ribbon. Narrative hallway with endless doors without a knob or dial. Breath visible and there! grace notes ensue.

greens tied with a pink ribbon

Or perhaps just stems and stalks. Snow alters all the garden’s outlines yours and mine. I miss pink petals whorled with white angle of each different spread back like teeth or standing shoulders rolled. Weak limits like a cyclone fence. Begin descent into the subsoil and root tangle of my own undoing. Or brick by brick the chimney is built, squared and solid. But first I am shattered held together like a sheet of safety glass.

and there! grace notes ensue

Emotions neatly set like eggs in each node of a pasteboard box. The road arches in its middle as if a dog rising from a nap. You coax me fingertips upturned and precipice beneath your feet an edge. Dawn lifts white-bright film from a lake surface faceted geometric shimmering mathematic. And about the world how it slips with uncanny precision between our fingers and how of all things love is most terrible.

lights up my spine brighten north

The way opens only as far as imagination hides its darkest corners. Rough tongues like deer at a salt lick snag and tug of berry brambles. Palm extended and fingers reach to brush latticed branches from an incidental sky. Wilderness pocked with each step toward a destination imperceptible and like a pinprick indistinct.

displaced air arrives by force

Roof lifted from the house and floating I nestle further to the interior. I fear honesty more than the darkest storm. And so I pull the thread of you backward through the loop of your own conceit. Panic shapes me as a flock of birds and so seeded I scatter.

an end without a knob or dial

The future reveals itself as one box nested within another but no end of opening. Some say the north star points home but the cold-shaken vertigo of aurora borealis (though rare) marks true location. And yet the undulating weft of you shimmers forth. A single loose thread and the mind unravels all its woes.