In the future we will have better
names for sadness. Our clocks will ring open

the midnight sky not as a pit of darkness
flaked with all the glittery yearnings out of reach

and dying, but more so as a peach still flush
with the Body Electric. We will sink ourselves into its sugars

while fields of flowers thicken, lakes unwrinkle their glints,
air turns our hair to soft & cool shadows of a breeze;

Every yellow petal lost to the weeks of rain will pass
for a moment in a swirl in front of the moon to become our sun.

And by the tick of teeth we grit into deepening breaths becoming sound,
our nose will taste time as sweet, as delicate, as a whistle of sunlight.

Alexander Zitzner, an undergraduate at UW-Eau Claire, is the editor of NOTA, an intern for Barstow & Grand, the assistant arts administrator to the Cirenaica writing residencies, and a recent recipient of the Nadine St. Louis Creative Writing Scholarship for poetry.

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