Everyday Dilemma
This breath took me all the previous breaths to reach it. I’m barely keeping up, constantly worried that I might have missed a breath somewhere distant in time’s past. But if I come upon that breath now, unsated, what to do? To breathe it would cause me to lose the breath that I would have breathed had I not been breathing that one lost long ago, thus occasioning me to, again, lose my breath, this present breath I’m currently breathing. In finding one breath I would lose another again, ad infinitum. What a dilemma! In searching, I fear to find myself whole, broken; in neglecting to search, I fear losing the splinters of what I might have once become. Deep within myself, I draw the shades of my apartment and concentrate, some studied monotone of hope and bone.
Recent work by Jeff Alessandrelli appears in BOMB, Poetry London, Gulf Coast, and Denver Quarterly. Called “an example of radical humility...its poems enact a quiet persistent empathy in the world of creative writing” by The Kenyon Review, Alessandrelli is most recently the author of the poetry collection Fur Not Light (2019). Entitled Nothing of the Month Club, the press Broken Sleep released a UK edition of Fur Not Light in June 2021. In addition to his writing work Alessandrelli also directs the non-profit record label/press Fonograf Ed.
