In the ocean one fish
swallows the other:
a geometric progression of loss.

You are bigger than I.
The calamity of love
swelling out larger than us.
And what destiny partakes of our dilemma?

Swallows the cause and effect:
eyes and kissing mouths and enlarged
parts wanting to breathe and wanting.

There is no gentle sense to this.
Is there?
Only a kind of terror at the chain
of events, the scale of loss,
the ordered destruction one
against the other— all that something larger
awaits its moment.

BY ANGELA JACKSON