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

feature

July 2012

Theatre's Arab Turn

Tanjil Rashid

feature

July 2012

Apart from the odd Shakespearean exception, from Othello the Moor of Venice to the Merchant of Venice’s marginal Moroccan...

poetry

May 2013

Ad Tertiam

Saskia Hamilton

poetry

May 2013

Rows of pines, planted years ago – so many, were you to count them on your fingers, you would...

feature

October 2012

Pressed Up Against the Immediate

Rye Dag Holmboe

feature

October 2012

The author Philip Pullman recently criticised the overuse of the present tense in contemporary literature, a criticism he stretched...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required