About the Author David M. Alper’s work appears in The McNeese Review, The Bookends Review, The Fourth River, and elsewhere. He is an educator in New York City.Blueprint
I pretend does not exist. The house tilts where your
laughter used to level it, its rafters creaking beneath the
heaviness of silence.
Loss is a matter of symmetry— a single chair empty at
the table, a single mitten remaining on a winter’s
sidewalk, one side of the bed still warm with memory.
I measure absence in cubic feet, the area where your
voice would be, the unbuilt sanctuary of our last
conversation, the corner where you stood in the
doorway, a door that is no longer a doorway.
The street maps no longer bear you, but I follow the
lines anyway, measuring steps to a place that no longer
knows me, mapping coordinates of grief
like compass points.
eternal. You were the blueprint, the ground, the bones—
Still, the building remains.
I spell your name as a fault line, a fissure in the earth
Certain wounds are structural. There is a void that is