from What Will the Third Shape Be (Nekúia)

we went to sleep as if it were a country - let us make it one - we could (will) make it one, my native Land
Emily Dickinson

as delay is the only humane action
as extending possibility into the future
is one form of love, and shadow
is the other

profitably immense, sun
asks that the bridge be raised
shoulder high in the lot

a water-damaged television
skyline, which in your lifetime
I pray will hardly transform

always there will be signs
of refusal of opacity

lossy compression
then two more nights

biting down on the comb
surviving by counterpressure

pain endurable because it is
productive, though also

subtractive, etching in relief
time’s swath unknown

in the other room, a foreign landscape
the midwives interpret descent’s

keen song, read progression
from screaming’s tenor, between

black clock’s stutter and the sleep
of the father, even at its thickest

only the topmost layer, water
from which there is no recovery

the nightly challenge is to emerge
to die into the dream of the glass field
of crawling, not to back away from the

fence, for obtaining a visa elsewhere
is impossible and the lie must hold
that each is the final mile

as land becomes only words
the alternative is born and rises
we see it at the edges, in faces

into its perfect ear I hush my question
but die into morning long before
the shape apprehends language

Serena Solin lives in Queens, NY. Previous chapbooks include Solar Inverter (Bottlecap) and The Stay Behind (beautiful days press). Solin’s poems have appeared in Works & Days, FENCE, Hobart Pulp, Tyger Quarterly, Sixth Finch, CutBank, Denver Quarterly, Heavy Feather, and elsewhere. She is a member of the Ugly Duckling Presse editorial collective and a PhD candidate in the English program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her first full-length collection, A Barer Sky, is due out from Winter Editions in 2026.