Fortune takes delight in her cruel business, determined to play her extravagant games

Every day is a good day. Every day you feel “fine.” Richard has sent me the links to the
YouTube videos

for how to manage seizures for which you are at risk, should they occur. I can’t watch them
the same way

I can’t talk about you to other people and all the rest of the things that I do. That I still do. The
words I say now

are like poems written with magnets on fridges in languages I once believed I could read.
The fridge is a script

I’ve made up on the spot, in a panic, spoken by a me I can’t imagine myself into. Instead I go
all the way

back to Horace and the poems that are taller than the skyscrapers I can see peering down
Amsterdam

through the hard air of winter because, like us, they have changed again, striking new chords
out of old skies.

Now is the time, they tell me. Seize the day. But I can only read the lips of lines I have
committed to memory

and wait for the sound to reach me. 

July 2025 | Triquarterly – Issue 168

109th Street, 2023, Harlan Epstein