At the corner of 116th and Broadway
my wife calls, crying. It happened again,
another satellite wrenched from orbit,
lost in the soundless ether,
another firefly extinguished
to scribble glow-in-the-dark syllables
on a stone.
Phrases from today’s lecture drone in my ear:
first serial rights, managing editorial,
cover foil stamping, hum like backyard
buzzing as we meditated in the spring,
or prayed, or came close to both.
Reality devours potentialities,
spits out those icy meteorites doomed
to orbit dying stars.
The event horizons keep expanding.
The honey bees keep vanishing.
Grief has abandoned me, flown out
over the polychlorinated Hudson.
My surroundings—red door
of the Episcopal church, sidewalk
scaffolding, iron university gates—
are palpable, but don’t bother about
my emotions. Let’s not get so intestinal.
Should I catch the fringe of sorrow’s
departing shroud, I’d cut over
to the Empire State Building’s
observatory deck, look down
at stars suctioned to skyscrapers,
fireflies lined into office windows,
their once-blinking bodies
light switches left on.
Ben Groner III is the author of the poetry collection Dust Storms May Exist (Madville Publishing), winner of the 2025 Storytrade Book Award for Poetry; the 2025 NYC Big Book Award for Poetry: Journeys, Memory, & the Self; and the 2024 American Fiction Award for Religious Poetry. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Orison Anthology, and been published in Peatsmoke Journal, GASHER, South Carolina Review, Rust & Moth, and elsewhere. Formerly a bookseller at Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, you can see more of his work at https://bengroner.com/