How to flee / or at least how to want to / how to thrum with silent shame / secret iconoclast hacking a red grimace / through Thanksgiving dinner / with people who love you / what do they know / gorgeous table wrought in your grandfather’s workshop / musty and alluring / the thought of your toes in the sawdust / marking his sacred space / always enough to keep you out / foreign as the delicate theme of periwinkle blue / running laps around your head / domestic reverence imbued with inscrutable meaning / too much movement inside / ideas popcorning skyward / dragging you down / like Rhode Island the size of everyone everywhere / penguined together against scathing wind / dense aberration fighting in vain / against smooth passage through space / just how you feel / in silence / the bitterest conflicts / weathered with lungs and fingers / silence is cleaner / even than this elegant dining room / that also slips through the night / with brutal speed

Elias Peirce is writer living in Portland, Maine, where they work at Trader Joe’s. This is their first publication.