HUSK 1.2

by Michael Martinec

Last week I lost hold of my tenses –
wrote sentences like this: Now, I will
have forgot she is dead & we’d not spoken
as I’d always imagined, she’s ahead of me.
I forgot how to write a poem & live
linear. I mean live within the
line itself – no that’s not what I mean –
I want to say: my sentences broke, mov-
ing back & forth through time but still
in the same moment, like film reels
played over each other unspooling different
scenes from different times, each scene
semi-dissolved, projected all at once,
compressed, pressured – a life flattened.