Content Warning: This poem contains graphic language.

The line is thin and the edge is close.

Some know this and choose to ignore it 

Others know and can’t ignore

Some are only reminded when face-to-face with lesser lines, lesser edges

They will spend days, months, or years even,

paralyzed

until the truth of the line and the edge are shoved into a corner and forgotten

They forget the line, the edge,

as one forgets the feeling of a child crossing a busy road;

cars loom over you, 

the engines talk, hissing and growling

as exhaust pours out and rises up past you

and the street stretches itself, a desert of boiling angry cement 

little legs shuffle and the crosswalk approaches zero.

But — for some reason or another — you always remember the line.

Crossing the street, you imagine a full-speed head-on collision between yourself and large vehicles.

Just the other day, you saw a raised Ford-F150 with a big bumper, driven by a man in his early 60s going about 45 and thought,

“A few broken and bruised ribs maybe, internal bleeding, something spinal, concussions and dime-sized chunks of windshield sewn instantly into scalp.” 

You imagined yourself then being flung and rag-dolled thirty-seven feet into the air before unforgiving pavement scrapes your skin down to bone.

You made eye contact with the driver as he went by

and went on with your day. 

The line is thin and the edge is close.

I am sure of almost nothing,

But this, I know is true

It can be seen in the crunch of the world:

The fickleness of conflict,

The authoritarian banality of a purpose.

While business men shit on the sick and poor without wiping

a mother’s tears fall on a child’s grave.

The line is thin and the edge is close.

Ben Bailis is a first-year student at Oberlin College. He crafts his poetry with a focus on clarity, using simple, direct sentences to evoke powerful emotion.