The World She Was Missing

She wants to step out of the painting,
turn her world over like an hour glass,
the trickle of salt marking out time 
in a way she’s never known before,
no oppressive tick, only gentle flakes
of snow heaping up at her front door.

She can see winter outside her window
and would love to make angels on her back,
waving her arms like wings, an albatross
before it takes flight. The heat inside 
is ruthless, the clank of a radiator 
that hisses steam at odd intervals.

Her cat, all streamed in sunlight, washes
itself on the window sill, oblivious 
to the news of the day, the shouting
headlines that hurt her eyes and make her
clap her ears from the sound of shells
and houses burning down to ash.

Years later in a time of enforced peace,
she will look back at her younger self
still stuck in a gold chipped frame,
her arms extended as if to gather up 
all the movement of the world she was missing,
all the people she would never touch.

J. R. Thelín’s collections of poems include Last Cha Cha in Albuquerque (2017) and Breath Into Bone (2010), as well as four chapbooks: Spin: Tales from the Diamond (2025); Those Last Few Moments of Light: Poems of the Dead Boy (2023); The Way Out West (2005); and Dorrance, Narrative, History (2004).