Editorial intern Madeline Williams on today’s short-short: Anny Tang's words weave light and dark together in a series of intimate images illuminating beauty when there is no escape from the world inside (and out). Tang’s poem “Holdfast” transports the reader into a three-dimensional memory, all too familiar; enrobing us in romanticization and remembrance.

holdfast

“Coronavirus: Robot dog enforces social distancing in Singapore park.” —BBC News (May 11, 2020)

how easy to romanticize what you can’t
touch—that night dyed with stars
& heat. patio floor a mosaic of shadow,
iced cola glinting topaz in our hands.
do you remember the blueshift of limbs
in midnight air, thrum of the crowd
around us like slow water? a woman
on another hemisphere couldn’t know
the spill of moonlight off your shoulder
onto mine then, honesty a burst note
in our throats. sometimes, I wish I could be
in two places at once, you said & I believed you.
years later, you shelter in a shadow box
apartment, the city patrolled by robot dogs.
her body cocooned safe beside you,
her hair rippling like dark cattails
in your hands. I read all the headlines
alone, a continent away & what I miss now
is all of it. the incandescent hope & ruin
of being young. halogen glow where bodies
brushed, everything stripped of consequence.
some things I’ll never know again. for months,
the crawl of frail sunlight across my bed
until it retreats through the blinds & my room
extinguished to dark again. in another life, I
would have touched your face then, oyster-white
under the skinned moon—the closest
I’ll ever get. in this life, I’ll wait alone for
the end of the world to swallow me, to the place
I never asked to come from at all.