Emptiness
holds its own

container.
Silence like

shaken silk,
the shimmer.

You’re alone.
The light fades.

You’ve earned
the solitude.

It doesn’t
matter where

you spend it.

Tom Montag is most recently the author of In This Place: Selected Poems 1982-2013 and This Wrecked World. He is a contributing editor at Verse-Virtual. He has been the featured poet at Atticus Review (April, 2015), Contemporary American Voices (August, 2015), and Basil O’Flaherty Review (July, 2016), and has received Pushcart Prize nominations from Provo Canyon Review and Blue Heron Review.