June 2026

Posted in: June 2026 Edition

Still Life: to name, to want

Nicholas Skaldetvind

All water began as storm flowing toward loneliness. 
We have yet to split loneliness into an isotope. 
Loneliness has two names: river and loam. 
Loneliness is a gloaming orange plinth, a brightness in the corner making dust over everything under your bed. 
Loneliness is strung out as a long, drizzled day the color of afternoon rain, standing, waiting. 
Loneliness arrives on a leash of curiosity as a Pomeranian. 
Loneliness is when two cold words touch, shaping the sound of a girl who was colder than I knew, perhaps still is. 
In my skull, loneliness rolls out from the hedge and chitters in the real and imminent wind. 
It is illegal to leave loneliness unattended. 
Night in the metro, and loneliness endures. 
Loneliness falls in all directions. 
Sparrows fish loneliness out of the air building nests of delirium while the sky thins. 
Loneliness practices its sentences.   
I sprinkle Berbere spice crystals over loneliness. 
In Swedish, loneliness is one perfect vase. 
Loneliness crouches on a stone intendent to the broken and real. 
A wreath crowns the patchy towhead of summer, the pillow whispering loneliness, electric. 
If the syntax of loneliness is tragic, what is the wager for our time being ours? 
Beneath the roof of loneliness, our blood drifts. 

nicholas-skaldetvind
Nicholas Skaldetvind

Nicholas Skaldetvind's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Berkeley Poetry Review, CIRQUE, Peripheries, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

More work by Nicholas Skaldetvind

1968 - 2026

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