Jason Graff

No one remembers beginnings, how palindromes begin or end only that some words are a mouthful before they are spoken. A future mapped out in loss languages on scratch tickets that never leave the rack. Vaguer than truth hyphenated–dashing words off pages, the longest palindrome.

Music fed into the fabric of the night by happenstance glows tomorrow in a comet’s trail. Hands, clammy and cold as frozen dew, shake too much to finish carving such a statute. Who would ever dare to be heard at all?

Nothing fits well, the room between the letters so small. Too constricted by time and motion to go back to imagining. Ill loom in eight brightly colored forevers; unrecognizable, disappearing.

Secrets misty in the past melt down to diamond whispers. Before time. So before time, it’s too late.

 

Jason Graff lives in Little Falls, New Jersey with his wife Laura and their cat Shelby.You can find more of his verse in In Parentheses, Subterranean Quarterly, Third Wednesday, Meat for Tea, Canyon Voices, Ol’Chanty,The Delinquent, Clockwise Cat, BrickRhetoric, Zingology and the Split Rock Review. His fiction can be found in The Vehicle, Sterling Magazine, Independent Ink, Thunderclap!, Nazar Look, Bloodroot Literary Magazine and Bosque Magazine.