Hannah Silverstein

Where to Look

When you realize you were focused
all along on the wrong thing—

swatting mosquitos the moment
the meteor flamed the atmosphere,

your friends gasping while
too late you look up to see

only what assumptions of familiarity
have made banal, only a dome

of imperfect stars, milky light
bridging moments beyond counting,

past this moment you have,
by cynicism or arrogance,

missed forever—what, if not hunger,
would you call the regret, rising

like the moon over the ridge, the sense
of worlds moving in silence

while you were asleep, the vow,
soon broken, not to blink again?

Hannah Silverstein lives in Vermont, but her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Terroir Review, The Ekphrastic Review, SWWIM Every Day, and The New Guard.