Mystery Object

By Sarah Galvin

Featured Art: The Art of Living by Saul Steinberg

You come out of the room where everyone is doing karaoke
and ask why I’m ignoring you.
I want to say something that suggests I’ve endured
some exotic, indescribable torture

but a completely mundane thing has happened,
which is you have stopped loving me.
So, even though your body is here, you are gone
and bodies are becoming less like a procession of individuals
than a texture like wet cement, but also like words that say,
“Why would you subscribe to such a mystery object”

and I think, it’s funny the cement forms words, especially these words
but something isn’t right about the word “subscribe” in this context
and I can’t tell if the sentence is a question or a statement—
Why is there no punctuation?
I want to run, but I’m already travelling in every direction at once.


Sarah Galvin is a poetry MFA student at the University of Washington. She is a food writer for The Stranger newspaper, and the author of their Midnight Haiku poetry series, which were neither haiku nor written at midnight. She has a blog called The Pedestretarian devoted to reviews of food found on the ground. Her favorite thing about running the blog is getting text messages that say things like “The bus stop at 3rd and Pike is covered in ham.” Her poetry has appeared in Dark Sky, Pageboy, io, Proximity, and Ooligan Press’s Alive at the Center anthology.

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