Size / / /

When I saw your boot-print
glazed into my snowy stoop,
I thought, There’s a trick to this,
finding your lover
in the record of his step,
the bite wound
of treads.

Like a cartographer
pulling the brow of a mountain
up through her map,
or a paper-folder
creasing cranes in the
unhatched dimensions of the page,
I’ll unfold you
from the floor-plan of your feet,
see how you’ve thinned
like February’s clouds,
collapsing into
a single sheet
of sky.

Your body is a track
pressed into winter’s crisp vinyl.
I can’t hear you
in those grooves
even as I spin their dizzy
vector, trying to make them point
home.




Peter Chiykowski spends his nights jotting down stories, poems, and a silly webcomic called Rock, Paper, Cynic (which George Takei and Nathan Fillion once shared). His writing’s appeared in The Seattle Times, Asimov's Science Fiction, and a few "best Canadian" anthologies. Once, in 1988, he was the planet's youngest living person.
Current Issue
12 Oct 2026

The way her eye wells / when she remembers she’s about to grieve gravity.
He had a second life, one spent in the river in laughter and play.
Because standing in the doorway, you get the sense that something is already standing there with you
Wednesday: The Recollections by Christopher Priest 
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