Anne Cheilek

Eclipse

The hole where the sun belongs
is very small. —Annie Dillard

The sentence is a series of arrested falls.
On the ground, under the trees, a salt
of crescents. In the path of totality people
stop traffic and step out. Eyes riveted to
the moment. All the nows hitched up
clanking like articulated railcars
on a lonely freight line. Blur of station.
Snatch of whistle. Snap of serrated pines.
For the purist the sentence has failed
yet lurches on fully loaded. Hoppers
seized up with the dust of memory.
Flatcars filled with the estimate of
accounts. A stab—at what?—for posterity.
The sentence tries to lasso the redshift,
particularize the stampede. The sentence
is a bust. The paragraph is a string of defeats.
The poem is a double blind. Its recidivist
sits inside squinting along the barrel
of her paradox and trying to correct
for parallax error, aiming at a cloud of
cinnamon teal or widgeon but bringing
down instead a circular plug of blue
sky, dead to rights, a manhole cover of
denotation. But for the famished it'll serve.

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Anne Cheilek is a writer and editor living in the heart of Silicon Valley—if Silicon Valley can be said to have a heart. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in RHINO Poetry, Catamaran Literary Reader, Gone Lawn, Juked and other literary journals. She is a poetry editor for DMQ Review and past poetry editor for Reed Magazine, garnering the latter their first Pushcart Prize.