The Window
I don’t think about
it much anymore,
but when I do,
life is a souvenir
won at a carnival
that ends up in
a desk drawer,
like long nights
of drinking and
worse mornings of
regret and sickness,
it’s like waking up
in the middle of
the night with
an eyelash worked
into the white part,
you rub your eye
until you look like
you’ve cried,
like a knife thrown
into the cold water
I watch the blade
split the stream
into two roads of
a choice I never got
to make, I get up
from my desk on
the ninth floor
and walk toward
the window,
I look down at
things smaller than
they actually are,
I think of you
and put my hands
in my pockets, how
simple it would be
with no control,
I stare down at
roads, people, all
of it making sense,
I lean into the
window and let
my forehead touch
this ordinary thing.
Josh Mahler lives and writes in Virginia, where he was educated at George Mason University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Plainsongs, the Evansville Review, Exit 7, Artemis Journal, the Carolina Quarterly, Light, and elsewhere.