"The Shadows" by Nicole Callihan
The Shadows
The cross-section of a shadow is a two-dimensional silhouette.
If I hold my hand up, say.
Or, sleeping on my mother’s lap in the days before days.
The cotangent of the sun’s elevation angle.
Like sitting on the stairs, like sirens.
A cashmere scarf at the throat, a neatly folded sail.
If I made a list of my fears, it would begin this way.
The loss of light moves at the speed of light.
A list of all I desire would begin similarly.
This property allows for the sky to appear blue.
Once, I walked in darkness, found you, walked away.
Gradually, things begin to blur.
The light pattern goes to shadow diamonds to undifferentiated black areas.
In an acoustic shadow, I can’t hear the dog barking.
The warping of a life.
The dreaming of a dream in which one dreams of dreaming.
By which I mean: I’m still here.
Nicole Callihan
Nicole Callihan’s books include SuperLoop (Sockmonkey Press, 2014) and Translucence (with Samar Abdel Jaber, 2018), and the poetry chapbooks: A Study in Spring (with Zoe Ryder White, 2015), The Deeply Flawed Human (2016), Downtown (2017), and Aging (2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, Sixth Finch, Painted Bride Quarterly, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Her novella, The Couples, was published by Mason Jar Press in summer 2019. Her latest project, ELSEWHERE, a collaboration with Zoe Ryder White, won the 2019 Sixth Finch Chapbook Prize and was published in March 2020. She is currently Artist-in-Residence at Asterix Journal.
Headshot: Amanda Field
Photo Credit: Staff