Kyle Seamus Brosnihan
Go find a stranger
ask them to imagine
what a billion looks like.
A billion of what?
the stranger asks.
A billion of anything.
Ok, the stranger says,
imagines
a billion apricots
a billion balloons
a billion stars
all crammed down
into the Grand Canyon.
It’s a mess, the stranger says,
eyes closed,
but they all fit.
Then ask the stranger
to imagine infinity.
Easily, the stranger imagines
going out into the world,
finding someone,
paying attention to them,
and asking them
about their life.
Kyle Seamus Brosnihan
Forget the world was ever here.
If ignorance is bliss than the void
is happiness. The future arrives
too late, and the past is all
we have left to look forward to.
The beginning’s not what it
used to be. The future is behind
us and it did not last long.
Today is the first day
of the middle of my life.
So, is this all life is? Living?
There comes a moment when
I refuse to settle for anything
less than more and that moment
is now. Or it could be. Or it
might have been.
KYLE SEAMUS BROSNIHAN is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and received his MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College in 2022. His poetry has been published in Hobart, Peach Magazine, The Mantle, Interpret Magazine, Always Crashing, Boston Accent Lit, and elsewhere. His poem "Martha" was voted Poem of the Year by the Brooklyn Poets in 2020. His first full-length play, "The Performance," premiered off-Broadway in March of 2020. His work was longlisted for Frontier Poetry’s 2021 Award for New Writers.