You didn't know: poem by Nicolas Reynolds

image by Layers, on Pixabay, modified

You didn’t know

today he was told

     you’re getting          older

          certainty is a           lie 

               her condition is          inoperable

and 

oh, you didn’t know about your other half-sister?

where’s the center that holds?

what doesn’t fall apart?

______________________

Nicolas Reynolds lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and their cat.

His graduate work focuses on literary aesthetic history, with a particular

interest in 20th-century poetics.

December 2025 issue