Jed Munson grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. His poetry chapbooks include Minesweeper (New Michigan Press/DIAGRAM, 2023), Silts (above/ground press, 2022), and Newsflash Under Fire, Over the Shoulder (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021). A collection of essays, Commentary on the Birds, was published by Rescue Press in 2023.

from Portrait with Parkinson’s

There is no anyway.

The self
anymore is particularizing
a new pattern through
darkness
that doesn’t subscribe
to my need to get this down.

A feather
on a stair dissolving
where something misinterpreted
the spiral of the well
as traceable.

Met by surface,
I’m reminded I’m
sloshing with life—

Feels like summer
out there,
the time you spend
feeling “out of sync”
with that expression,
the time removed from

our dense wait.

A scale shed on
its plural sense.

And held by this desire
to be known way back
into myself, past recognition
of desire not yet realized.

Someone said,
I’m having moments
I can feel are eternal
while they’re happening
and I,
in one, knew
exactly what he meant,
his tracing
my hope for looking back
as in awe
as he of us then,
my tracing.