A face in profile

is like a folded wing. A sleeping face is a dry riverbed with the faint sound of water somewhere below.

The White House, it seems, is now made of glass,

and its occupant insists on throwing stones.

I was always a party of one.

I’d come in, sit down, and make myself uncomfortable.

Too many selfies

and a face forgets how to go blank, trapped in a permanent facsimile.

A mountain is a mountain

not because of its height in absolute terms but because of its distance. It stands apart—but also in the way. Its roots go deep.

I was lost

and didn’t know it. I had a cellphone-shaped hole in my heart.

A road is a blankness,

a life sentence for its strip of land. But sometimes it glows, livid as a scar.

Sound travels more slowly in the cold.

Over the next four years, some words may freeze before they leave our mouths.

Seasoned, we say,

as if time and weather were condiments.

In penmanship class,

time itself was looped, recursive, as my vision blurred and fingers cramped around the cursèd pen.

Ribcage:

simply because of that word, I have always thought of my insides as a jail.

Growing up during the Cold War

we watched for the flash of a nuclear strike by day, and by night, the mysterious lights of UFOs.