It was years before I learned to call
this prayer: the right-hand corner
of a page turned down to make another
page. I attempted to escape, then return
to the boneyard where I’d removed
an earring from my wife’s right ear—
diamond, the crux of the universe,
contracting to leave a pin-sized hole
mid-air. In that margin, my words
remain transfixed until she disappears—
proof that while I swore the world
I’d created would double like a hand
beneath my own, it merely stretches
before me in consolation. There, there.
This appeared in the December 2013 issue.
Jim Johnstone won a CBC Poetry Prize and has published four collections of verse.
