What's Left

By Jade Bailey Brock 

I don’t read the news anymore. Up north, they have this phrase for people like us: tammaqtutit uppirusukkavit nalligijaunnginnirnik?—do you mistakenly believe you’re not loved? All those letters crowding out the spaces where the seers used to go. Driven by conquest, our love builds bridges by the ivy of our counted end of days. Yesterday, the streets of Boston surged with ice as if G-d itself had carved a bypass from Nunavut to New England. The great Earth trembles and I stuff this ache behind the writing on the wall: bomb cyclone, Putin, Palestine. Every unturned corner giving vision where one needs no word for love, where one has no want of bridges as distant as the floes that surely melt our crooked hearts.

Jade Bailey Brock is a writer and MFA candidate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Stinging Fly, Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review, The Examined Life Journal, and Bayou Magazine.