The planet pulls our bodies through
the year. Delivers us, headlong,

into the tears in currents. The ebbs
and flows of blood in chambers,

bombastic and flooded with unremembered
names. Neighbors bourne feet first

through their door arches.
Down the corridors, lonesome

and lost. Their voices suture
the silence behind them and

the little song pulsing its staccato 
cannot explain the day and the day

and the day, like an arm and then 
another pulled through a sleeve.

Copyright © 2018 by Oliver de la Paz. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 3, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.