share


Endings

Everything I’m writing has been short recently.

I don’t like to write endings. I’m bad at them.

 

Endings must have a stake in what happened,

and I’ve never been interested in what happened.

 

Where have we been? Endings ask.

Where must we go from here? They answer.

 

Some people, lucky ones, can only write endings—

as if forever in state of taking stock and gazing out,

 

as if to fall, to fear, these things could go on

indefinitely, as if shadow were just another word for shade.


ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR

is a writer from New York. His work also appears in Ambit, the Boston Review, poets.org, and elsewhere.



READ NEXT

Art

June 2012

'The Freedom of Speech Itself', or the betrayal of the voice

Lorena Muñoz-Alonso

Art

June 2012

‘The instability of an accent, its borrowed and hybridised phonetic form, is testimony not to someone’s origins but only...

feature

May 2014

The Quick Time Event

David Auerbach

feature

May 2014

The ability of computers to semantically understand the world – and the humans in it – is next to...

poetry

May 2012

Monopoly (after Ashbery)

Sarah Howe

poetry

May 2012

I keep everything until the moment it’s needed. I am the glint in your bank manager’s eye. I never...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required