I count my lifetime in eggs. Today we eat three
for breakfast and move like wind. Tomorrow I let them sit.
These are the days when I’m equal parts neurons
and empty space, which is always, but I’ve been well aware
of the blankness in between. I eat my egg and read my paper.
I am told I’m regressing. When I speak with you, it is from
the emptiness between our bonds. Hold two worlds,
watch them collide. I retell you the stories you don’t remember. You
believe the meaning is in the page’s white space, not the text itself.
There are atoms there, you say. I want whatever’s in between. You ask
me how so much can fit inside a shell. How much life can possibly
form inside something else. I know where everything goes when it is
tired of containment, or wondering, or possibilities, the roundness
inside a text—where every inevitable thing moves as light. Today I
form as half liquid against your hands. How much of myself is
something to become.
Noralee Zwick is a student and poet based in the Bay Area, California. A California Arts Scholar and Iowa Young Writers Studio alum, their work can be found in orangepeel mag, Blue Marble Review, and Polyphony Lit, among others.
