A friend asks if I’ve been writing

& I laugh, a small, muffled laugh,
unsure if thinking about writing

counts as writing. Emptiness
is part of the process, I think.

Silence, a more sensible response
than words. Between grad school

requirements, a hundred students,
& a crumbling world, how does

something so airless & immaterial
find its way to demand space?

As if writing about forests
resuscitates forests. As if tyrants

topple over verses of text.
& what privilege, obsessing over

line breaks, experimenting with
structure, finding the perfect way

to capture a grief so many drown in
outside the page. What privilege,

all this musing, this distillation.
Still, something in this city—

between limbs cross-linked
in commutes, in drops of rain

caught in nets of smog—
heaves a revelation: a rumbling

beneath the rubble, a voice
in the fire. & what was it,

Farris said, about offering poems
to a burning world? Here’s

another. & another. & another—