Mark My Words

by Michael Dylan Welch

First published in Open Book, the 2026 Western Washington Poets Network anthology, edited by Griffith H. Williams, printed on a hundred-year-old letterpress. Originally written in October of 2023 and January of 2024.

deep winter

so many semicolons

in Mother’s will

not a single em dash

in my alphabet soup

slowly crawling away

the period

in the entomology book

an ellipsis

in our conversation

election news

my best thought

coming out of a comma

how fast it is

the en dash

between gravestone dates