A Beautiful Thing

by Tristan Franz

I’m smelling the broth of my own personal winter
you know the feeling
of laying on your rug just to feel a change
the pipes and echoes below finding their way
into your body, you know the feeling
of bones being bones through the cold
or maybe you don’t – what a beautiful thing
to be unable to define a feeling, finally
something that isn’t in a thesaurus, finally
something that doesn’t serve any purpose

I want to roll in this moment until I become its vocabulary
until I smell like the bones
until I am its echo…

It may mean nothing tomorrow
(and who knows what it means today)
other than the fact that I am present for it
these 30 seconds or so of being me
surely it is worth laying down for
amidst all the words, all the trying
surely it is the solution to something

Tristan Franz is a writer and educator from Brooklyn, New York. He writes mainly poetry and creative non-fiction and is interested in topics such as decolonial thought, cultural ecology and indigenous poetics. He holds an interdisciplinary master’s degree in the study of the Americas from The City College of New York. You can find recent work here.