Year after year, adaptation: never
unwieldy, but steady. Sometimes careless.
Always there is traffic, and groceries.
Those are the easy things. And then sometimes
these ruptures, or raptures.
Great distances
expand / contract with my breath in tempo.
And the night sky so open. What the hell
is the Big Dipper, my friend says. You guys
make up the funniest names. And one day
I will find a way to talk about ‘home’
within the vantage of plurality.
Will no longer wonder on ‘belonging.’
There’s language, and then there’s the rest of life.
Madeleine Bazil is a multidisciplinary artist and writer interested in memory, intimacy, and the ways we navigate worlds—real and imagined. Her poetry and criticism is published/forthcoming in Seventh Wave Magazine, Identity Theory, Pleiades, Stanzas Poetry Magazine, Split Lip Magazine, Dreich Magazine, and elsewhere. She was long listed for Palette Poetry’s 2023 Rising Poet Prize.