Blackbirdan online journal of literature and the artsSpring 2022  Vol. 21  No. 1
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back RODNEY JONES

When Everything Is Nothing

Often I imagine a shirt, no thread, but I see a shirt.
Without question of having sufficient art or cloth.

But one stitch, and there I go, the shirt
forming before me, and sometimes a month

eclipsed by the design of a pocket or a resolution
to take on some difficult taper I’ve avoided

or let go of patterns I’ve needlessly repeated.
I could say it is perfect. Unfinished. Unstarted.

I hold it and do not hold it, the pure notion
of the collar, lapel, sleeves, and pearl buttons.

Then I am transported, as to a gigantic fish fry.
The shirt that will never be and the shirt

that was and does not remain are the same.
I see it because it is not. Absence requires music.

If there is something to show me nothing,
it is like whistling, I must make it out of air.  


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