By Heather June Gibbons

Featured Art: The Ouroboros by Theodoros Pelecanos

Regret does not descend in a cinematic miasma.
It hits like nausea, creaks back and forth
on a limited axis like one of those vaguely
eggplant-shaped metal cages you used to see
in fast food playgrounds across America.
Meanwhile, the sky unfurls its violent ribbons
and karate kids spar on the green. I am driving
or rinsing a dish, or picking zucchini, or whatever it is
I do now that I’ve outlived my misspent youth,
confused by the hair-trigger pairing of regret
and nostalgia, the head and tail of a snake stuck
swallowing itself in the relentless ouroboros
of endings that beget other endings, memory
like a waterwheel that we’re tied to, half-drowned
and just trying to make it around one more time.
Grimace, I embrace you from the inside.
The place is empty, let me stay awhile.

---

Heather June Gibbons is the author of Her Mouth As Souvenir, winner of the Agha Shahid Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she lives in San Francisco, CA.

Originally published in NOR 6