by ADAM DAVIS

I’m trying to appreciate
record skips, deleted scenes,
navels, chasms, entera,
white-outs and redactions,

the empty, gaping spaces
of atoms, cabinets, skulls,
the parsecs that divide us
from unfathomable stars,

parts no longer part of me:
baby teeth like craven
troops deserting one by one,
nucleotide deletions,
cells that burst and die
every seven years,

the 14 billion years
before my birth,
the looming future eons
that no cosmologist
will be alive to measure,

the third of life abed, asleep,
the increments of movies missed,
the guest rooms never occupied,

the last, badly timed
I love you on the phone
cut off since the other
interlocutor hung up.

Eventually, perhaps,
I’ll come to love blank pages
of the manuscript,
the measures full of rests
that depopulate the score,
but for now, give me fullness,
blue and blinding, everything
a million at a time

Ω

Adam P. Davis grew up in Maryland, majored in French at Wesleyan University, and received his masters degrees in political science at Columbia University and supply-chain management at Purdue University. He has taught English at several community colleges and spent a year in Shanghai. Currently, he works in the logistics industry. He has been published in Meniscus, Glassworks Magazine, Free State Review, East by Northeast Literary Magazine, and Silver Rose Magazine.

Paz Winshtein is a visual artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. Born in 1985 and in love with drawing from a very young age, the artist by age twelve was creating original oil paintings inspired by surreal painters such as Salvador Dali and Hieronymus Bosch. Winshtein’s education involved different art classes from middle school and through college. At age nineteen, the artist began an art career by doing local art festivals, and soon expanded to art shows.