Sneeze on a blank page.
Call it interruption poetry.
That stanza wasn’t going to launch

anyhow. Your ode to the anacoluthon,
punctuation releases itself
from a corral to take a brisk walk

in the windchill heavy morning.
Why? The first
and last question

to ask, knowing no one will answer
you. The silence is nothing to [pause]
You know the rest. Break it

anyway you can. It’s the sudden
exposure to bright light
reflected off snow and incurable ice.

Arousal of memory you interrupted one
too many times. Fragments
scar the walls inside

that Olin Library study carrel. You
hide from the world
inside a thesis swirl of notecards,

quoting everyone quoting Woolf
way before laptops and Google.
Metal in the stacks. An aerosol

of song before the word pandemic
took up residence in the highest
aerie, refused to leave. That view.

Live with it down here
where solitude
is slang for [pause again]