Caleb Jagoda

Safer Means of Travel

All I want to be is the dead air congregating
on either side of a phone call between a parent
and their grown child trying to shorten the impossible 
distance. On good days, everything feels like poetry. 
Life is a quarter flip. 

I feel the normal human pangs, learn a couple things 
about a couple things; gather moments like morels, 
lop a pad of butter in a pan hot to trot. How many times 
will I move before finding home? I have never stopped 
worrying. I have never

stopped worrying my legs have a mind of their own, a brain
in the calves like a moon in the sky like an eyeball in a skull
leering fat and light. My body is a stone raking the earth,
raking the earth. Can I swim through the veil of my head
to arrive at the present? 

All I’ve done to get here, and all I want to be is the
space between a parent and their child grabbing an item
off the grocery shelf, awaiting approval before placing it,
some small world, in the cradle of the cart. At the end
of the journey, grant me sanity.

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Caleb Jagoda is a poet, journalist and MFA student at the University of New Hampshire. His work has appeared in Blue Earth Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, FOLIO and Down East Magazine among other places. His debut chapbook, Hunting, was published by Bottlecap Press in 2025.