Drinker of Ink

by Shannon Castleton

“A sense of an empty afterward.”

If I Am Not Who I Thought I Was

I could stay with you, and you could be my axis.

So much happens to and inside every human being on this planet—it’s as if we are all small infinite worlds. And how do we connect? How do we come to see each other’s constellations?

Again I remember how the soul leaves the body like mist rising off the East River.

“Vivienne, you’re better than poetry.”

Or finding one body, among all the bodies in cities and villages, in vehicles and trains, amid wars and rush-hour traffic—one body that knows precisely how to hold you. Whose heart, when you’re held, fits just beneath your ear, whose mouth speaks your name with just the right intonation—is finding that body long enough?

The present we live in vanishes before we blink, let alone write it down in ink.

He is the wish that encompasses all wishes.

How many steps, how many days, how many words till I hold her?

He had been love breathing outside my body.

they’re yours—my words, all the care I took with them.

But we should have said I love you as the punctuation between sentences.

to write is to allow pain and love and memory and time to exist outside yourself. You breathe when the words are out.

because even ten millennia with you would not be even almost long enough.”

I felt as though a song had been wound up in my heart my whole life, but was waiting for the notes of her laughter.

We said, Of all the creatures on earth I choose you. I love you filled the space between sentences.