To Ryan Upon Realizing It’s Only Day Sixteen

by Suzanne Allen


Time doesn’t so much fly as dissolve. I think it’s two, but the clock says five, and I thought it had been twenty-seven days. I have no idea how many people died today. Ask a hundred great men what knowledge is; they’ll say an edge, a curse, a fleeting thing, but ask just one great woman and she’ll tell you simply that there is always more mystery, like Cat, how each morning before she’ll eat, she insists on that spot of light that bounces off my phone screen in the sun, chatters at its shimmy on the ceiling, lurks as it slides down the wall, then leaps and leaps. Her food was delivered today, but you knew that. Enough for two months. Do you think she knows she’ll never catch that light?


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"To Ryan Upon Realizing It’s Only Day Sixteen " is part of Suzanne Allen's new collection We Wash Our Hands (Write It! She Said, September 1, 2021)

Suzanne Allen is a teacher from Southern California. She holds an MFA from the CSU in Long Beach, and her poems have appeared widely in journals, magazines and anthologies, both in print and online, some have even won awards, but this past year-and-a half, the newest ones have mostly only been written on postcards and mailed near and far; not coincidentally, her first full-length collection, We Wash Our Hands, is newly available on Amazon.com. She also has two chapbooks: verisimilitude from corrupt press (2011) and Little Threats from Picture Show Press (2018).