V Joshua Adams

Problem of Fiction

Each night she thought he would imagine them
in another place, where he had been
with someone else. A stone house in the dewy hills,
or a blinding rooftop near the bright sea.
On a straight dirt path through spreading fields
of thigh-high grass, listening less to the crickets and birds
than to the low static that was breath
moving through her body.
And he, that she would run
fingers about her neck and chest,
thinking they were his, that he lay beneath her, then,
smelling of tobacco and mint,
telling a story about learning to swim—
the marble columns of his mother’s legs
shocking even now—and that afternoons, nights, and mornings
were mere light and shadow on this bed, these walls.

He might have been riding the bus,
reading a magazine and bringing a tissue to his face,
momentarily moved by the fate of those so distant.
She might have been in the garden,
slipping seeds into the damp soil
to form rank upon rank of darkening sunflowers.

What can’t be said can’t be said,
but one can say so much. Low enough,
the world contracts, and the very objects
that composed their constellations
—mirror, sofa, cocktail glass—they too appeared
to blink. The morning star is the evening star.
The subject of pain is the person who gives it expression.
In reality, there was only this parenthesis,
and the one inside, where someone pretended
what they would pretend.

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V Joshua Adams is a poet, critic and translator who teaches at the University of Louisville. His first full-length poetry manuscript, Past Lives, was published by JackLeg Press in 2024.