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Are you really sure that a floor can’t also be a ceiling?
—M.C. Escher

We replicated your experiments
in some elementary school classroom,
made delicate patterns
from circled     & inverted forms.

Now you come to me
a gifted black     & white postcard,
your staircases looping themselves
with     infinite     regularity.

How do_
                    you_
exist?                     draw an object
                    _that
_doesn’t

Pencil me     a space cubby, please,
a time hole where a woman could fit.
I tuck     nothing-fluff in after me,
seal edges & delete evidence of my escape,
roll until     ink jet black     covers all.

You can tessellate my leavings,
should you     find any that matter.

Otherwise,
let     me     be     junk
that flies to outer limits
where a man with (too many) arms
hugs himself, disappears.



Stefani Cox is a poet and writer with an MFA from UC Riverside. Her poetry chapbook, The Stars With You, was published by Cooper Dillon Books in 2022. Stefani’s work has also appeared in The Rumpus, LeVar Burton Reads, and Lost Balloon, among other outlets. Find her on Twitter @stefanicox or her website stefanicox.com.
Current Issue
12 May 2025

You saw her for the first time at your front door, like she wanted to sell you something or convert you. She had light hair and dark eyes, and she was wearing fatigues, which was the only way you knew that your panicked prayers of the last few minutes had not come true. “Don’t freak out,” she said. “I’m you. From—uh, let’s just say from the future. Can I come inside?”
Time will not return to you as it was.
The verdant hills they whispered of this man so apt to sin / chimney smoke was pure as mountain snow compared to him.
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