Loopholes
All the classes you spent transcribing
what the professor said,
and how your students are typing
what you say
even though what you don’t
is important too: how eggs came
340 million years before chickens; how
nobody’s life turns out as envisioned;
how what you wanted but couldn’t get
is the elephant in every room.
No need to write that down—grief’s
easy to remember. At the conference,
every sideways glance is familiar.
You feel the loop the loops
of their assessments, see the wrinkles
on every trunk, the ivory curl
of each tusk. Euclid. Escher. Picasso.
The pursuit of lines and birds
and sides is necessary to make
more rooms. In the window seat
going home, the hollow man
stares at you (or you at him),
behind the two-paned glass,
easing back between the pains.
• • •
Kenton K. Yee has placed poetry and short fiction in over seventy publications. His recent poetry appears in Plume Poetry, The Threepenny Review, Rattle, TAB Journal, Sugar House Review, Stanford’s Mantis, The Indianapolis Review, Summerset Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and Constellations, among others. A former Columbia University faculty member, Kenton writes from northern California. He is working on his first novel.