QUID EST
It’s a twitching eyelid in your stomach
while the wildflowers sag like the rain they so desperately need.
It’s a lukewarm coffee.
It’s a balloon-less parade.
It’s Friday, and you work tomorrow—
probably have some hunger for lunch.
It’s an empty box of Altoids
while your breath is perfumed with sulfuric death.
It’s a dance without any dancing—
something like yesterday’s news.
We’ll play Jeopardy in the spillway
with stories we can’t quite remember.
Avoidant of emails, it’s the laughter we share—
a laughter that costs nothing of nobody
but rather gives itself away.
What I love in this poem is how it captures that strange, low‑energy fog we all fall into sometimes, where everything feels slightly off‑beat. The images — the twitch in your stomach, the wilted wildflowers, the lukewarm coffee — feel so familiar it’s almost unsettling. I like how the poem leans into those tiny disappointments that quietly shape a day. And then there’s the dark humor of “sulfuric death” breath, which somehow makes the heaviness easier to hold. The shift toward shared moments at the end feels unexpectedly warm. Playing Jeopardy with half‑remembered stories, laughing at nothing in particular — it’s the kind of connection that makes the dullness bearable. The poem doesn’t try to fix anything; it just notices. And that honesty makes it feel deeply real.