THE NEW NORMAL

We used to wish for adventure nights,
wild urban neon, rebel tales told
in vodka language, beer songs spilling
from summer windows.

Now we long for safe country sleep.

But still.

There is simmering
and fierce desire.

I’m in slow boil, 
my heart a rogue’s apothecary
of forbidden medicine.

Just wait, the hopeful voice says.
Wait for it.



BEAUTY IN ISOLATION

You fold in and in on 
yourself until finally
after the last fold 
you are a small
but perfect
origami.



A HELLISH SEASON

The discovery of innocence is its loss
yet amidst the sanctioned ugliness,
to take the risk of beauty—
that’s the rise of living!

Some call this a mottled faith,
an ersatz version of impending zero,
but it’s not nothing.

Across the uncivilized terrain
where predators binge and walls are terminal:
so many exits into the afterlife,
souls rife with arriving.

It’s here that we bed down
with the miracle worker, dream
of the vanishing point, try to gain
our agency even as it negates us.

The only questions left:
What did you try to save?
What wreckage did you win?

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Eva Tihanyi’s ninth poetry collection Circle Tour will be published by Inanna Publications in spring 2023. She is also the author of a short story collection, Truth and Other Fictions. Tihanyi lives in St. Catharines, Ontario.

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