Hold a Moment, by JL Silverman

A Time For Every Purpose Under Heaven, by Lorette C. Luzajic (Canada) 2018

Hold a Moment  
                            
I’m too busy behind the eyes to hold a thought but time.
At quarter to twelve the second hand stops but not my scattered. . .wha?. . .a fish pokes at my breast to remind me I’m alive. 
Or perhaps this coat with planet dots looks more like fish food dropped on navy.
Knobby pretty knees peek below the hem, breezed by passing scales.
I flap my hands to hold still. Splay them flat, right angles to hips, press down, push away from the fishy bottom, squeeze further and further up into the roundness of time. Which grows and grows and is never enough and devours me – neck then shoulders and cosmic dotted jacket, pulled into thin elongation like matter spaghettifying at the edge of a black hole. The numbers themselves stretch and stretch as my knees pass by the open mouth of a pink fish. Hello and goodbye pretty thing. Neither of us is astonished as my toe tickles past its wide eye. 
I’m consumed by that which never ends and which I forever chase.
How do I fit into what is in constant motion, yet movement remains unseen? 
If I don’t hear the tick in the softness of green, will standard time pause – will midnight ring – will my busy mind tire – will I have fish for dinner – or will I be on the plate?

JL Silverman

​JL Silverman is an MFA Creative Non-Fiction student at Chatham University. Her work has been published in the Griffith Observer, the medical journals Imaging Economics and CLP, as well as recently chosen for an Ekphrastic Review Writing Challenge.