The Amherst Student × The Lilac

The inaugural edition of The Lilac x The Student, brought to you by The Poetry Club and the Arts & Living section, features “Nothing Entire,” a poem by Joe Sweeney ’25.

I watched that man spit in her eye. He didn’t mean to — it was for her nose, and her mouth, and her left cheek. She knew even this.

She fingered her ring, which was embossed with an “A,” and beneath it — above the second digit’s knuckle, amid its dry parchment calluses — was ink stained black in the shape of an “S.” Slipping it from her finger she traced the ring along the blunt ending curve, like an olive fly upon a river which is pitch and airless and dark.

She dropped the ring, and — in the silence that was my distance — her finger rose to the eye. And I thought of all rivers vanishing at their ends as the dark loses care, and that she might annihilate all ending (with a touch, in a silver circular memory silence) with this dropping she had been given. But then, as the finger met her eye — she rubbed it in deeper.

and so in nothing entire could it be drowned.

And that man had come back to watch, and he was sorry.