FALL/WINTER 2025
Exit Interview and Other Poems
Timothy Donnelly
Francisco Rodríguez. March riot, 2023. Courtesy of the artist
Exit Interview
I sometimes think I said it best when I said nothing but just sat there
like a criminal. I trust I made myself clear when I said finally,
at last. I think I put it just about as well as can be expected
under the circumstances, but all the signage says I really nailed it
when I said yes, of course. And if I let the world walk through me
for a long time after, it was nothing, just some cinema
no one really goes to, although a few of you may have heard of it
or dreamed of it as people scattered across the globe right now are
dreaming of places they’ll never have time to visit, or of people
they’d like to become but can’t—it’s almost as if a force
like money keeps them from leaving, or like a strong salt wind,
until the forlorn look of animals gazing out past the electric fences
a life erects around itself eclipses other expressions. And when
I wash my face in the washroom at the end of a long day
of thinking long and hard about sending the email, if I decide to let it
live its life out in drafts like a plaything I can put away and return to,
put away and revise at a later date, it’s almost as if a force, again
like money, but recognized by no economy, is lengthening
the moment before the moment everything changes, and standing there
in it as needed has become, but shouldn’t have, the crowning of my life.
Francisco Rodríguez, Boy, 2024.
Carving of a Lion Embracing a Man
When I hold it in my hands I grow unsure if what I’m holding
is made of ivory, but when I place it on the table, I feel confident
that it can’t be. Proximity in this instance raises doubts
some distance lays to rest, contradicting what experience
has so far insisted—namely, that the closer I get to a thing,
the more knowledge I’ll have to show for it. This same logic
motivates my movements in the produce department, and finds me
leaning physically deeper into a text whose meaning I find
ambiguous. Questions pertaining to the object’s medium likewise
give way to those regarding what it represents, with the nature of
the embrace hard to fix—what looks at first like combat
softens into love as you approach, and the lion’s wild eyes
appear neither filled with terror nor meant to provoke it
but widened in relief so strong it compels the animal to look up
in wonder as the man’s lips part—not in pain, but to whisper
words of encouragement into the mane that shawls them both,
saying all things weave into their opposite, and not just once,
but endlessly, so that even when we interknit our similar hands
together behind each other’s back, we’re never not on the verge
of departure, its sorrow indistinguishable from the bliss of return.
Francisco Rodríguez, Black dog and the blue moon, 2023.
Good Thinking
The 18,000 species of butterfly call to mind the very thoughts of God
materialized, said the lepidopterist, and not just for the sheer
pleasure of it, but also to remind us of God’s goods and services, color-
coded advertisements published in spasmodic loops and zags through all
space and time. I gave the word through a good thinking one night
and concluded a movement through space must likewise always be
a movement through time, whereas to move through time requires
no such effort one’s part—just lie there like a doormat, time handles
all the rest. Like so much else in life, this appears to have been based
on a lapse in understanding, as I thought to be in one place
then another meant you had to move, but science is telling me things
exist probabilistically, so in multiple places at a time, because they aren’t
just particles, but waves—as are bacteria, butterflies, people, and stars.
To be in two places at once isn’t the same as leaping through
time’s deepening dark from one to the other, but it’s also not the same
as simply being where you are. It’s that proverbial third thing, elusive
but as old as time, like feeling for a moment you might be yourself
till another person stops you, or does to you again what they should
never have even once, and as you walk it off, you ask: is it a God who thinks
in butterflies who watches me now whispering I was never really here?