Lose Not, Lost Not

A fractured catalog poem that turns repetition, loss, and emotional collapse into a chant of broken equivalences.

A poem that opens with eleven bare repetitions of the word 'This' stacked down the page before any content arrives, then releases a catalog of dread - 'dream that runs against the feaver,' 'child birth absolutely alone,' 'bandit at a small store,' 'courage gone' - gathered under the flat conclusion 'These things we think of, / Of going up and down, / and coming apart.'

The column of 'This' is the poem's boldest gesture: insistence emptied of object, a finger jabbing eleven times at something it cannot or will not name. When language finally returns, it comes as paired losses - 'gain of style / loss of manner,' 'weakness in the bones of love / shouting to be left alone' - each item poised between having and being deprived. The title's symmetry, 'Lose Not, Lost Not,' tries to forbid the verb in both tenses, but the body of the poem is nothing but loss anyway, so the negation reads less as protection than as a vow that fails the moment it is spoken. The closing 'coming apart' admits what all that repetition was holding off.