By John Hodgen

Suffice it to say we’re all that we have. We’re tagged. We’re it,
despite the occasional monoliths that pop up in Nevada deserts
begging us to believe we host astral visitors or nascent iterations
of ourselves. All in all it’s pretty clear. It’s just us who keep showing
up, and who, given enough time to gather the shards and bits of our
thoughts, are trying, albeit admittedly, intermittently, to figure it out,
the it being this-messy-business-fix-that-we’re-in, this requisite
dog and pony miracle show. It’s in all our next breaths, our Where
did it go?, I had it right here, the it that we’ve lost, that we held so tight
in the palms of our hands the way the prophet Isaiah says we are
held. The it long gone now, like eternity, like Puttin’ on the Ritz,
the itsy-bitsy spider, the Iditarod without snow. Heavy hits there,
though we know (do we not?) that children hold the half-lit world
in their eyes each night, holding out for one more Stuart Little,
one more peep out of us before drifting off in little candle boats,
planes and canoes, as if they’re in some children’s edition of Casablanca
in Sanskrit, with their letters of transit to infinite, immaculate sleep.

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John Hodgen is Writer-in-Residence at Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Advisory Editor at New Letters. He is author of six poetry collections: In My Father’s House, Bread Without Sorrow (winner of the Balcones Prize), Grace, Heaven and Earth Holding Company, The Lord of Everywhere, and his latest book, What We May Be, from Lynx House Press.