Dodo Eraser

Those who heard it reported a tingling

            in the earlobe, spiraling deeper, like a coin

                        dropped into a mall funnel,

            a warmth which spread into an awareness

                        of the bones inside, the ossicles

            whose names they never learned

but could now trace like the splayed fingers of a hand—

                        stapes, incus, malleus—

            and stepping back, say, Touched,

                        talking not of tympanic membrane,

            which is, strictly speaking, always

touched, always humming a dirge or a hymn, some news

            of the world; no, Touched, as in a tinge

                                    of madness, silence

louder than the voices that would break it,

                        but not a silence, a tart burst

as of citrus in the temple, a faraway door swinging

            open, and what beyond it but the suggestion

                                    of moonlight, impossible

                        to comprehend (to touch), threaded through

            the listener as a memory is threaded through

                        the eye of the moment and bends back again,

as we all bend back, inevitably bowled over

                        by the sheer unworldliness of the world.

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Joshua Zeitler is a queer, nonbinary writer based in rural Michigan. They are the author of the chapbook Bliss Road (Seven Kitchens Press, 2025), and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Foglifter, HAD, Shō, and elsewhere.