by Joanna Solfrian

Mid-breath I think of her and whether she’d consider my mothering well done.
Mid-breath there’s a hitch and I debate crying, just to get rid of the hitch.
Mid-evening and—just to fuck with the mid-breath—I shove out a sigh.
It is still mid-evening’s deciding point: Google forms or dishes?
Mid-evening and sex is off the table: cramps and barbed synaptic fangs.
Everything is failure. Mid-poem and I know nothing.
Mid-poem and I think of breasts, mine mashed into a sports bra,
a friend’s replaced, another friend’s grazed with my lips for show, like the cigarette—
it’s all just an original wanting, isn’t it? The bleak midwinter is both the fore-
and background of wanting. Monday: snow on snow, and mid-pandemic I
leave the apartment with my bagged heart. A gift for a stranger, for anyone
who’ll take the gutted beating thing and pat it, saying,
there there, it’s not so bad.

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Solfrian’s first collection, Visible Heavens, received the Wick First Book Poetry Prize, judged by Naomi Shihab Nye. Her second collection, The Mud Room, came out last year from MadHat Press. She has also published a chapbook of ghazals with Finishing Line Press called The Second Perfect Number. Solfrian lives and works in New York City.