Difficult Knowledge

Licking up the rustle of golden brown, she sniffs toward it. A pill bottle of molasses rips around the winter sky. It is not snowing, but it did earlier this week. Not as bad as the inside of a root canal. A minute later this will not make sense. 

My aunt or great aunt turned 90 today or does tomorrow. Obvious answers make me skeptical. Four times I have blinked that I’ve noticed and she is blinking now, more often than me because I’m staring. Staring at a series of doors that rarely change position but are often walked through. A stream that sometimes saves, sometimes oppresses. This is how we know that value isn’t real or isn’t stable. Would we be bored if it were?

There’s a glitch here. Do glitches produce miracles? I wish I wrote my questions as answers so that their asking would be more subtle, more definitive.

Originally published in Wingless Dreamer: Vanish in poetry 2022