Current
Issue
Volume 12.1
Jacob Griffin Hall
—
Labyrinth
At first, we were lost.
We held our black jackets
in our hands and held out
our hands to each other.
Eventually, we were lost.
We joked about the ways
we’d most like to die, held
out our deaths to each other.
Inside of a maze, the outside
is lost, which I can’t imagine
is anything but an untamed
metaphor, a jaguar, something
liberating, like being alone
together. There’s never been
an honest way to strip one thing
from another. We watched
the red tanager dissolve
between the leaves, which
to me seemed like its own kind
of labyrinth, colors turning back
and forward and back again.
We joked and laughed and died
together. We watched each other
watch the tanager disappear.
Jacob Griffin Hall is the author of Burial Machine (Backlash Press, 2022). He serves as the poetry editor of the Missouri Review and lives in Columbia, Missouri.
