by Erica Goss
You opened your arms
and said: as long as we’re
together. Whatever
tore between us, we’d
stitch it up. I thought
words were solutions.
I thought problems
existed to be solved.
Repeated enough times,
words lose energy.
It’s as if we’re asleep
at sea, blind to the beacon
that sweeps the horizon.
We ignore the glacier
calving in the distance,
though every wave tries
to warn us, and every
gull’s song throbs with
the knowledge.
Erica Goss is the winner of the 2019 Zocalo Poetry Prize. Her collection, Night Court, won the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. Recent and upcoming publications include Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Spillway, Redactions, Consequence, Slant, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and Critical Read. Erica served as Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, CA, from 2013-2016. She edits the newsletter Sticks & Stones.
A-Minor 
Lovely piece of homage to the denial of horrors. We are all complicit.