Rainie Oet’s poems ‘Caverns’ and ‘I Miss the Slug Ooze of That Summer You Died’ are published in The Poetry Review, Vol 108, No 4, Winter 2018.

Picture walking down a noir-film’s hallway, in and out of slatted window shadows. It’s like you’ve been walking forever. You don’t know how long. If you choose at any time to stop and look outside a window, you see night. It doesn’t make sense. Because when you leave the window and keep walking down the hall, the light streaming through the windows is blinding.

Window 1: Natalie Diaz: ‘It Was the Animals’

“This is serious, he said. / You have to understand. / It can save you.”

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Window 2: Ariel Chu: ‘Ebenezer, Ebenezer’

“By the time our parents found me, my whole body was covered in pale caps—waving and bobbing in the wind, fat with all the things I’d never said to her.”

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Window 3: Tracy K Smith: ‘My God, It’s Full of Stars’

“We saw to the edge of all there is — / So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.”

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Window 4: Porpentine Charity Heartscape: ‘One-Move Boss’

“The bonus level is calm and grassy. You fall asleep in the field of spinning power-ups, suspended in a blue nowhere sky.”

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Window 5: Douglas Kearney: ‘Darth Vader, King Laios (Fill Out Their Applications as, Across the Lobby, Genghis Khan’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” Ringtone Plays): Fathers of the Year’

“What I did killed me already.”

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Window 6: Walt Whitman: ‘A Child said, What is the grass?’

“All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, / And to die is different from what any one supposed, and / luckier.”

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Window 7: Michael Dickman: ‘False Start’

“We hold hands in the middle of the ocean and look just like a painting // His paint has just now started to chip away // He needs to be restored // Carefully, now // My brother”

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Window 8: Mary Oliver: ‘A Summer Day’

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

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Window 9: Wendy Videlock: ‘If You’re Crowish’

“You are putty in my hands // said the wind // to the stone”

 You come to the end of the hallway. A door. You try opening it. But it’s locked.

Rainie Oet is a nonbinary writer. Their work appears in The Yale Review, Shenandoah, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. They are also a game designer and Editor-in-Chief at Salt Hill. Read more at rainieoet.com