Melissa Strilecki

John Barth Phase

In a metafiction work on the short story
he cuts a paragraph to a line              a word                         a single mark of punctuation
Godlike                                               this concision
quiet economy                                    I am a font of want
body-bound                                         Desire                         unmakes me
Not to belabor the point                     but
I wrote all night                                  ;

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Melissa Strilecki has been previously published in Sugar House Review, Variant Literature, The Shore and others. She lives in Seattle.