The apartment is blue, filled with an absence
posing as air. Something like ice pelts the windows.
Rupture of morning: thunder rolling in like
tanks surrounding a city, and the sky throwing
down rocks as the day grays into itself, into
whatever version of itself it wants to be. There,
already I’ve mistaken storm for story, already
I’ve assumed that something that lives in time
follows its own syntax. How badly I want evolution.
I am alone. The dog curls into a sweetness.
I have been here before, I have never been here
before like this—sure and boundless and close
to happy. It is May, and for days, I’ve been thinking
of someone else, the green storms of his eyes.
A few glazed lights blur yellow through the rain.
It is May, and I know I will never return to you.
Maja Lukic is a Poetry MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Narrative, A Public Space, The Adroit Journal, Colorado Review, and Sixth Finch, among other journals, and "The Slowdown" podcast. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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"already I've mistaken storm for story". . .I love the doubling in this poem: alone but also thinking of someone else, who usurps the "you"; the story and the storm. I love the enjambment at "close/to happy." A beautiful soft, deeply felt meditation.