You were preoccupied by ice and your stance
in a given moment – wondered if the time
you spent looking for a pen could erase any
inclination towards individual expressiveness
and perhaps if every thought is redundant, then
your body would be reduced to water falling
from the gutter, trailing leaves into a spiraled
disintegration of fingerprints until your voice
lost itself surely in a muddled myopic pooling.

We stood together throwing stones into
a liquid atmosphere, and found a grace
in solitude, standing wet to the ankle as
planets collided abstractly between your
toes, an extension of your particular posture,
and your vision was somehow aligned with
the sharp, shrill sirens that broke that silence,

the neighbors were home – at least it felt that way
as the floorboards began to shake and the hallway
laughed and we spoke of patterned lights rearranged
under your iris, perhaps some smell had unlocked
one of those traces that escaped our casual attention,
the ones we had recently discussed, that could mark
and overlap within our absolute identities – casual,
remarked how the sunset looked like frost on red velvet.

There were bells, or perhaps a piano, and you
sat under the notes as if they would eventually
nourish you. I peered through the glacial window,
imagined my shadowgraphs as figures trapped
within the deep cavern of our relative earth’s core.
These were exercises in mobility, ways in which
we could experiment with an alternative, impossible
state – and I felt the winter in a way only my skin
could, and you were identified by the colors released
from tinted light bulbs – the stars fell back against
your forearm, a rustled arbor made celestial by vision.

Magnetic, those cold corners – you were curious about
the nature of fixation and I knew you would have to
adapt, not to be lost, to become mercury in a pool of
silver. We stood in a stilled stream of smoke and genuine
discretion, traffic changing, challenged momentarily
by the inclination towards a violent assessment of intellect
but there was nothing vicious in it, the air was truly mild.

Jacob Griffin Hall was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1991. He received a Bachelor of Arts in English with an Emphasis in Creative Writing and a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from the University of Georgia in 2013. He currently lives in Athens, Georgia and is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing.