CALAMITY
First Week
You were born in
Wisconsin. I enter your
apartment wearing the old
rehabilitative gesture. How
quickly will this moment,
as its own chore, diminish
into another stereotyped
surprise? Telling you
is not an edge. The first
impulse of what veers
in and out is hesitation.
I would love some water.
If it’s always like this
I would never take my
sweater off, but we both
know tomorrow’s noon
will faithfully reproduce
every ambiguity it allegedly
resolves. (Or were the traces
dispositive?) Gaunt is the color
of every new morning –
what lapse convinced you
otherwise? Light and orange
rinds osculate along
the hesitation. Hands enter
dusk, fabulously blank, but
you think morning causes
sad feelings. Miracles
quickly become their own
conclusion. The goal is its
own shape. Peel here, it says.
Engram Wilkinson's work has recently appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, Figure 1, Black Sun Lit, LIT, and The Offing. Born and raised in central Alabama, he lives in San Francisco where he studies law.