Jane Zwart

It's hard to care from far away

When people talk about themselves,
a room lights up, a den in the brain. 

True, the self thinks she’s a renter.
Ask a woman where she’ll live 

in thirty years’ time: the den will go dim,
and in the mind’s suburbs 

a different apartment will kindle,
a loft in the highrise where, at present,

her acquaintances come and go,
dentists and baristas, the principal 

of her child’s school. But in thirty years,
the self will inhabit this selfsame room 

where now, for a moment, she stands
in the dark failing to imagine 

someone who resembles her mother
tying orthopaedic shoes.

All her life, when this woman
says I, all the lamps will come on.

. . . 

On the radio, a neurologist explains
that we regard our future selves 

as acquaintances, and acquaintances,
he says, we stop at wishing well 

enough. Which, to hear him tell it,
is why we don’t save or do sit-ups. 

For months afterward, I ask myself
how I could love her ahead of time, 

her low bone density, her small trust.
In the dark, I am failing not to say I: 

On occasion, we wanted to move
heaven and earth for somebody 

we hardly knew. Sweetheart,
I don’t know what moved me.

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Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University and co-edits book reviews for Plume. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review and The Nation. Her first collection, Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best, came out with Orison Books in February 2026.