Guided Meditation
The voice in the meditation video says to draw a line
through the world, rather than weeping.
Rather than weeping, I draw a line through the world.
Name the colors you see as specifically as possible. Burnt umber
is better than orange, which is better than not-quite-red.
At a dinner party, someone tells me the secret to writing
is to put the most important words at the beginning
of each sentence. A man, I loved him. I wanted him. He didn’t.
I wanted, I loved, I—which first? The line through the world
is cerulean, sky blue, dusk, ash, black, silver, lilac, stopgap,
time-spent, soft gray. Most people stop worrying as they name colors.
I still worried. I should have asked him, Where is this going?
I should have asked, Her or me?
But each sentence, then, felt so difficult.
I didn’t know where to start.
He said, Make me handsome in your poems, at least.
And Imagine the extent of my suffering. All that imperative tense!
I would, at last, ask him. This will never end, will it? Will it ever end?
At the end of a sentence, one can add what matters less.
Descriptive language, dates, places, the time of day, the light
pouring in through a restaurant window, and how his face in it
was almost ugly—almost, I thought this—as he looked up
and said, How could you ask me something like that?
Copyright © 2026 by Victoria Kornuck. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 16, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem began with two pieces of advice—one from a meditation app, the other from a legal expert at a dinner party—about how to use language to exert control. I decided to try taking both as I wrote about a time, years earlier, when my attempts to articulate how I felt and what I wanted had failed. Of course, I was no more in control with the words in a different order, or the colors of the world named sequentially. But the advice led me somewhere unexpected and true, which is perhaps better, in a poem, than control.”
—Victoria Kornuck
Victoria Kornick
