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How It Is
Maya C. Popa
Chutes of sunlight flicker on and off revealing webs between the creeping vines. One floated down, bouquet of legs and all, and lifting that life’s sheer work out of my hair, I marveled at the absence of fear. Beyond me lies an inconceivable patience, since it has no sense of the way things ought to be. They are again, the jasmine breathing out at six p.m., the magpie’s protest as it scales a higher branch. They are: the busking musicians in the station, and the cemetery’s privacy worried by a footpath. All day, they are. What I think is a mouse is a wren skipping through the brush. I listen for its song so long what breathes around me thinks I’m lately dead.
Maya C. Popa is the author of the forthcoming collection If You Love That Lady (Norton, 2026) and two previous collections, Wound is the Origin of Wonder, named one of The Guardian‘s Best New Books of Poetry, and American Faith, winner of the North American Book Prize. The Poetry Reviews Editor of Publishers Weekly, Popa teaches at NYU and is the founder of Conscious Writers Collective (CWC), an online writing community for poets and prose writers.
