Poetry

Trusting Good Things

And not testing them to see if they’ll break

Roman Newell
The Interstitial
Published in
2 min readOct 2, 2024

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Photo by Casey Horner on Unsplash.

one.
In early hours of morning-darkness I press
my finger into
clay, then smooth it out
in long strokes until everything is flat
and there is room again.

I shake out pencil dust like cake
crumbs, then look
at the corner of the living room. I could poke
my finger through a hole and tear
it open.

I blow tufts of spent eraser off
my notebook, push a pencil-shaving shell
onto the marble counter. I hold
my eraser to the corner of the room, moving
back and forth. I stop
when it begins to erase, mortified that, maybe,
my whole existence is pencil on paper.

My sponge-body soaks
moroseness, it’s too early to feel
such remorse, the sun is
already late, I am already falling, half-ways,
like a car in a sinkhole.

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Roman Newell
The Interstitial

Busy working on my novel, 20XX. I also talk about the writing journey on Substack. romannewell.substack.com.