Impact

It feels callous to admit but still true that  
when a car hits a stranger, since you don’t know  
their favorite flavor of ice cream, you can still  
remember yours, bought in Florence just off  
the Piazza del Duomo with your wife, the wife  
who now is in the street in front of the car  
that just hit her, which collapses the world  
to a pinpoint outside of which nothing else exists,  
except a stillness inside you that aches and tingles 
like a limb that’s been asleep your whole life  
and is being used for the first time now that  
the impact you weren’t there to see, strikes you— 
the absurdity of being inside sitting at a desk 
or getting a glass of water while this happened 
outside, where the figure lies in the middle  
of the street, face down by the double yellow line  
that seems like an equal sign stretched out  
and insisting that no one is more important  
than anyone else. Although the moment is more  
specific and personal than the swirls and patterns  
of the iris of one’s own eye, and nothing  
is more unsettling than the emptiness of one’s  
own head, and it wouldn’t seem strange  
if a manta ray swam by over the streetlights  
and Dali’s clocks melted in the trees and the only 
thing you could bring yourself to think or wish  
is that those clocks don’t tell you time is up.  

MICHAEL T. YOUNG

Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has appeared in journals such as Pinyon, Rattle, and Vox Populi.