AT THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

Seeking someone’s hand to grip onto, while
hanging over the vastness of this turquoise mouth,
agape and smoking. You; another blue-eyed Jules Verne,
explorer of cores, holding a dwarf planet in his palm.
I am always wedged between the desire to exist, and the want
to dissipate into nothing at all. Could I be your nothing?
Something you knew and loved once, but have since forgotten
after time-traveling. Sometimes, when trying on
alternate realities, I wear the pale earth, wash my shoulders
with an ounce of it. Make an incision in the middle
of the ocean, and I will climb out of it, horses rushing
along the grey sand cleaved by waves. The sea meets
the sky, braided into it. It is a rope, even fraying.

Dominic Xavier is a journalist with an attraction to poetry. He is a winner of the 2022 Gaffney Prize for Undergraduate Poetry and sometimes spends his time working as a literary editor and growing strawberries.