When someone is yelling in a movie, I turn
the volume down. She was running
in a field, though nothing
was chasing her and there was nowhere to go.
The truth was this: We are each
running for our lives. Flailing
our limbs as if split-bodied, ill-mattered,
tired with the decades but desperate
enough to run. What form does a void
take in a field as relentless as stone? I felt most
myself when I was least loved. Cast into
the night like a half-formed sound, I was falling
toward sleep when I heard a faint
rustling as if it were calling from a distant world,
near enough to startle me awake.
My eyes opened; the room, empty.
They say we are made from astral debris.
They say a crater in the ground is an imprint
of hunger cut from a falling, far-flung thing.
Jennifer S. Cheng is the author of Moon: Letters, Maps, Poems, selected by Bhanu Kapil for the Tarpaulin Sky Award and named a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2018.” She is also the author of House A, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Omnidawn Poetry Prize, and Invocation: An Essay, an image-text chapbook.