Vignette

Designating the season imposes a timeline. For reproducing
weathering, or weather. Vision in the deep freeze.
How things thread together: a domestic scene, wide open.
Last night the room was scenic. Then in the hour between
sleep and waking, an invented snow. A countable
bit of rain, she wrote from California. I held a narrative
throughline, or an image next to a question.

Then three types of taking as consequences of silence.
Cold, a dry flurry. Kettle spitting on the hotplate.
I hadn’t even read the text in full—only drawn
conclusions from paragraphs, particular paragraphs. Sun,
ice, juice. A swimmy feeling in my head.
That a scene has transpired, but an uneasy sense of surety.
Ob-scene, in the sense that something’s bent.



Reprinted from Surety (Inlandia Books, 2026) with the permission of the author.