in parentheses

Holly Wiegand is a doctoral student and teaching fellow at Boston University, studying 19th-century literature of Britain and America. A Montana native, she enjoys fishing, kayaking, skiing, and discovering what it means to be human. Her poetry has previously appeared in DASH Literary Journal, Polaris Literary Magazine, and Peregrine Journal.

Photography by Co-founder Michael R. Pitter

---

An Accumulation

It was agreed, safe

late morning
in a coffee shop
between the bank and the Thai restaurant

turning over her words like so much ripe soil
sifting, folding
gently

I try to read the crumbs clinging to the muffin paper,
blackened juice and grains
an impossibly rectangular sugar crystal which
leans over the edge of the plate

“They come back—they come back.
Everything comes back,”
she says,
leaning her chin into her molded palm

There is a band-aid on her middle finger

Standing on the lurching prow

did Theseus wonder if
his reflection was himself
only
a nanosecond younger?

a bundle of
well-arranged dust
and matter
flickering, peering back

the gradual darkening
of the eye
gradual fading
of dye from the hem

reaching for any sort of
intelligibility
cosmic or otherwise

I will never be Frank O’Hara

lounging restlessly
on the bank of the Charles,
nor was I meant to be:
watching fetid leaves
(so many distorted stars)
unmake themselves
across brick and asphalt.

Holding my own empty palms,
I learn to fill them again.

One day I will be tall
enough to reach the pigeons,
the spiders, the prayers
still among the arching gothic.

For now, I wear poetry like a cloak—
stockpiled, plagiarized,
sutured, grafted—

a collection
of their and my impossibilities.

Again

Find me again
in the midst of years

when you have become
not what you thought you’d become
nor what you wanted to become
entirely
but what you have become;

and I will wonder
what misshapen thought, what fate
what was it that tuned our souls to
entropy
to the ticking of clocks.

---