A minute in its creaseless uniform in a row of cadets, salutes
Dusk can’t contain the torn sky’s entrails
A half-past-nine like all the others but its own half-past-nine
An unpassable valley between tick and tock, the scout reports back
The scout measured: distance equals length times time
Distance circumnavigates time
The prisoner’s minute was beaten out of him
My minute looks like your minute but isn’t
Freighted, bubblewrapped in a cardboard box, minutes
Boxcut the flap, lift them out one by one
Thirty schoolchildren’s eyes on the clockface at 2:59 is a half-hour
The scout reports: the minute to come has already gone
Accumulated “a minute longer”s don’t add up
Denise Bergman is the author of five poetry books: The Shape of the Keyhole (2021), Three Hands None, A Woman in Pieces Crossed a Sea, The Telling, and Seeing Annie Sullivan. All are book-length poems. She edited City River of Voices, an anthology of urban poetry.
