five points, worn blunt from shoes and strollers and the sag of grocery carts.

i put my boot in the center like i’m slotting myself into a socket, waiting for the current.

five seconds i hold it, my ribs buzzing like a cheap neon sign.

i imagine i’m a radio tower beaming every stranger’s leftover thought: what they forgot on the list, the argument they rehearsed in the car, the soft panic of someone who can’t remember where they parked.

the sixth second burns—i break off, shuffle inside where the lights are too bright, each fluorescent tube humming its own white confession.

i grab the lime seltzer, the one that tastes like static, and a bruised avocado i know i won’t eat but still want to cradle.

sometimes i think if i stand still long enough, the universe will line up all five versions of me—the one who moved cities, the one who stayed, the one who quit early, the one who never showed up at all, and me—and clap its enormous unseen hands like thunder, saying: finally, you figured it out.

‍but it never does.

instead i drift through checkout, the clerk asking if i need a bag.

i shake my head and hold everything pressed to my chest, like offerings: static water, soft green fruit, proof i was here.

outside, the scratched star waits without caring.

i don’t step on it again.

i keep walking, carbonated, my chest fizzing into nothing as if five seconds is the most my body knows how to contain.

Published 6th December, 2025.

‍

Ella Mae is a young poet from the Bay Area whose work often wanders through the ordinary and the aching — the flicker between what we hold and what slips away. Her poems lean lyrical but stay rooted in the small, unglamorous moments of living: grocery store aisles, quiet parking lots, the hum of fluorescent lights that feel a little too human.

‍