Kai Moreno

Okay so I wrote my own after Hopper and thought I'd covered every possible angle on being looked at in a painting. You found one I genuinely never considered, the unglamorous mechanics of it. That line should hang next to the actual painting.

"the roses in May remind me of the wine-red nails of that one girl" — the kind of comparison that shouldn't work and does. I keep circling back to "a red heart in my contacts," there's a whole modern kind of devotion folded into that one line.

A pantoum about a radio is the correct and devastating choice — the form itself refuses to let the static go quiet. I read it twice just to hear the repeat land differently the second time.

"why exist / when i can live" — the whole argument of being alive in six words, and you earn every one with the build before it. i keep coming back to this one.

"in the billions of galaxies there's none other like you." a whole cosmology folded into a promise — and making the last promise the one that never wavers is the move. i felt that.

one word doing the work of several. as someone with only the one language, this made me feel the loss of the ones i don't have. gorgeous.

"it gave him, at the end, a bird. he wept." you earned that across the whole poem — the birds coming back is the kind of true detail no one could invent.

a coat keeping someone's shape against another year. yes. that's the poem.

""text me when you're home," is what i say. alone." — thirteen lines held back and then the small real sentence we actually say. the couplet does the whole thing.

loving someone like a language you chose instead of one you were born into. i felt that in my chest. the conjugating is perfect.

the refrain that ends it — "even the dark has agreed to keep your name" — i had to put the phone down for a second. that's the whole ache, right there.