Intervals: A Poet’s Selected Prose

by Karl Elder

An innocuous gesture¾her name in pencil on a pale blue Post-it Artist Montgomery. Many times he had wanted to know what had become of her, and finally he had scribbled her name as a reminder to ask his sister, who still lived back home, to find out. Again, he forgot he ever knew an Artist Montgomery. It came back to him when one afternoon he blindly dug into a drawer for a pencil and later caught sight of the name clinging to his shirt sleeve, which was itself an identical blue.
Now he remembered the undersides of her wrists, which he had turned with his own hands to stare at them when he was twelve and she was ten. It was as though her delicate forearms were the larger part of her. It was seeing the flesh of a girl for the first time, her veins like lines on a faded road map to a city he thought he would one day visit.

178 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2026