Paul David Adkins
Who hasn’t thought this?
She is
here then here then
here.
She cannot be touched;
his hand goes right through her face.
It’s not the drugs, not what
the doctor calls
delusions.
Sometimes, her voice is off,
vibrato or robotic. Sometimes
he can smell the ozone burn
like a stroke of lightning,
and she’s flickering pixels.
He reaches for keys:
she’s there.
He feels for her hand:
he’s holding a rock.
The world is full of evil, he says, full of
dimensions disrespecting our reality, or something.
His wife is trapped in a mirror somewhere,
in glass, far away.
Yanked through a portal,
snatched through a shimmering stone.
♦♦♦
Paul David Adkins (he/him/his) earned an MFA from Washington University. In 2021, Xi Draconis will publish his collection Long Time Burning. Journal publications include Badwater, Kissing Dynamite, Spillway, and Barzakh. He has received one Best of the Net and six Pushcart nominations and the 2019 Central NY Book Award for Poetry.