By Zebulon Huset
Sheets of rain swished through the city
smearing silhouettes of civilians along
wet avenues like telephone poles smudged
into blurs in train windows. We’re all marked,
tagged for one destination or another.
Some smears shine iridescent when lit
from the right angle, at the right distance
like a perfect solar eclipse—unique in that
‘only a few trillion exist at a time’ fashion.
When we say a crush is one in a million
in that leading up to the ‘L-word out loud’
stage, we don’t consider the dozens
of better matches just roaming in the rain
on either side of the Mississippi River.
Any one of those smears of human sluicing
by in the standing water might be the one
which is only one of the ones potentially
in earshot at any given murky moment.
About the Author:
Zebulon Huset is a public high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Booth, Meridian, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Fence and others. An advocate of strength conditioning your creativity, he has posted over 2000 writing prompts at his blog Notebooking Daily and edits the prompt-based Sparked Literary Magazine which is back from hiatus in 2026.