By: Elizabeth Onusko

 

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We’re adrift on a raft in a lake.
Overhead, a flock of starlings
magnets together
and spirals through the air.
What can I tell you of endlessness
other than it will lessen.
For now, let it be enough
that we’re here together
as subterranean streams
feed and drain the lake
and vapor rises, sun-drawn.
As water droplets
feel an impulse to cloud
and the sky renders itself
transparent. As we stare
at the observable universe
and exhale, briefly
and mercifully emptied.

 

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Elizabeth Onusko is the author of Portrait of the Future with Trapdoor (Red Paint Hill, 2016). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Best New Poets 2015, Conduit, DIAGRAM, Sixth Finch, Poetry Northwest, and The Pinch, among others. She is the editor of Foundry and assistant editor of inter|rupture. Her website is elizabethonusko.com.