Soledad Santana’s second poem from Issue One is unsettling in its calm. It takes place in a room we recognise, with objects we think we understand, and lets them slip out of register. What should be small and incidental begins to feel deliberate. What should be affectionate begins to bruise.

The poem pays close attention to sequence and consequence. Each action leaves something behind, whether that’s heat, light, or trace. The insects are not symbols to be decoded but lives interrupted, noticed just long enough for their erasure to matter. By the end, the poem offers no commentary, only a trail. The reader is left with evidence rather than explanation, and the uncomfortable knowledge that nothing here was accidental.

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