Fascinator
by Joshua Zeitler
I began the day reading Renee Gladman’s Calamities, wondering if there’s an intransitive verb for constructing borders that are actually membranes. I tried on an adjective: architectonic. It fit like a funny hat that wants to be bought but can’t make a case for when it would be worn. I opened Grindr to feel a different kind of disappointment: too trans for the masc4mascs, not trans enough for the chasers. Warships and fighter jets were amassing around Iran. The battery in my alarm clock died. I seem to remember its trepidatious tick decelerating, but I couldn’t possibly have witnessed it. I keep it in my office and never work. I’m tired of living in a country that sees border as a transitive verb, a violence. I want to live by the day, the month, the year, not the slowed-down second between Alex Pretti’s disarmament and murder. My dog has begun whining for dinner earlier and earlier. I will have to give her up. I’m trying to write longer sentences, but. Once I wrote a period is only practice dying in a poem. It was a terrible poem, so I tried writing another with the same line. Then another and another. No luck. The line was too architectonic. I could feel the borders of my intentions shifting each time I wrote it.
Joshua Zeitler is a queer, nonbinary writer based in rural Michigan. They are the author of the chapbook Bliss Road (Seven Kitchens Press, 2025), and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Foglifter, Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, new words {press}, and elsewhere.