for E.

Translation is often difficult,
whether from nightmare to consciousness

or body to body, so how to speak of (or with)
language in either or any case? Consider

a possibility in which language is not inadequate
but instead somehow situationally inappropriate,

a confusing formality that consumes as it is consumed.
Or how your touch tracing my hollows would give voice

to a tongue previously acknowledged only in dreams.
We’d soon discover—somewhere between initial

encounter and waking up cold, a divide ever-widening
between literal meaning and intent into a chasm of mis-

interpretation—how our imperfect cadence reveals
misalignment, a syntax rough and broken between us.

---

Jennifer Molnar is the author of the chapbook Occam’s Razor, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in West Trade Review, Luna Luna Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, New South, Hawai’i Review, So to Speak, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from George Mason University and resides in New York.