All summer the rubber tree misunderstood itself
as a subtropical creature with permanent rights to the patio.
Fall corrected that illusion.
I carried it inside
before the cold could finish the argument.
Now it stands beside the southeast window,
where the morning light arrives like a polite guest—
knocking first,
then slipping across the floorboards
in a thin, honeyed ribbon.
This light was not made for grandeur.
It does not flare, or boast,
or promise anything it cannot keep.
It simply lifts the room an inch or two,
enough that even the rubber tree notices—
its leaves catching the brightness
with the same shy greed
of someone receiving a compliment
they secretly hoped to hear.
I water it slowly,
as if pouring out a small confession.
The soil darkens, swells,
takes what it needs
without apology.
I do not tell the tree
that I admire its stubbornness,
or that something in its resilience
feels tender to me this morning.
Plants are suspicious of sentiment.
They prefer steady hands
and predictable light.
Still, the room shifts—
a quiet choreography
of leaf-shadow and sun-warmth.
And for a moment,
we are both content
to be exactly where the season
has delivered us.
Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025
Category: Poems and Sonnets
Unknowable: An Allegory
“Do you think we are unknowable?” she asked.
Caimon looked down at the dirt around his feet and noticed his shoe was untied. “Not completely, no.”
“Do you mean that we are partly unknowable? But partly knowable, too?”
He could feel his pulse in his temples as he bent down to tie his shoe, “I think we can know someone as much as they are willing to be known.”
She wondered about his answer as she leaned over to tighten the Velcro on the side of her own shoe, “Do you want me to know you?” She whispered the first part of the sentence, but the second part leapt too loudly from her mouth.
“I guess I want everyone to know me. But not really.” He could tell, right away, this wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear.
“Well,” she said, with securely fastened feet, “I think I understand.”
Caimon tried to make a joke, but it fell between his feet, “Maybe you do. But not really.”
As his paltry attempt at humor mixed in with the dirt beneath the hem of his pants, Caimon wanted her to walk away. He didn’t like the weight of her stare, and he didn’t want to feel responsible for her anymore. In a moment of desperation, Caimon turned from her—filled with the conviction that he would never look in her direction again—and he said, “Why do you always need to know? What is wrong with not knowing?”
His footsteps were slow and heavy as he could feel her blue eyes fastened to his back with long, thick ropes tied around his organs. Her eyes pulled at him and tried to stop his movement until, between one exhale and the next breath in, he felt her release. The moment of her imprisonment was the moment of his freedom, and in his freedom, he began to run. Not fast and with nowhere to go, but with the swiftness of a man whose shoes were tied and whose longest mistake grew shorter behind him.
Caimon ran with his secrets. The unknowable parts of himself were rattling around between his right ear and his left. They were sloshing back and forth between his rib cages and percolating up into his throat. The words he would never say, the feelings he could never explain, and the courage he conjured in his dreams but left stuck to the sides of his imagination were loosening with each new footstep. He wondered whether it was dangerous to allow the movement. His secrets felt like gumballs in a gumball machine and he had only ever seen one fall at a time: what would happen if the whole lot was disturbed at once?
He laughed under his breath and panted fog into the cold night air, “If only I had a quarter, I could find some courage to chew on.”
He laughed again, but this time he knew it wasn’t funny.
The words of the girl wrote themselves on the trees surrounding him, and he could hear them on the wings of the wind that fell through the leaves. He watched his shoes as they hit the ground—left, right, left, right—and he began to count the steps. Each step was further away and, somehow, closer, too. Further from her: closer to something new.
It wasn’t any one aspect of the girl Caimon needed to flee, but the anchor her whole had become. She needed Caimon, and Caimon didn’t want to be needed. She expected things from him, and he wasn’t sure he had what she was waiting to discover. He didn’t want to disappoint her, to lose her, or find her, and the girl only wanted to be found. Theirs was a connection of two negative magnets, one wanting to change her charge. She wanted to change the nature of herself so she could be pulled into Caimon and he into her, almost as though the choice no longer belonged to them.
“Unknowable,” he read as the words wrote themselves in the reflection of a lake up ahead. Caimon stopped running and never looked back, but sat on the edge of the water.
The air was so cold by then that his breath felt like crystals grabbing the edges of his lips as it was blown from his body. The forest was silent and still: the kind of stillness that lowers itself like a parachute over nature when the moon is moments away from switching places with the sun.
Caimon, tired and cold, reached into the pocket of his coat to find his book of matches. Once he was certain the matches were there, he looked near his feet for pieces of fallen wood. One by one, Caimon reached into the dirt for the wood, methodically like he was looking for pieces of a puzzle that had fallen to the floor. Once he had gathered enough wood to build a fire, he reached into his pocket and pulled out two things: the matches he knew were there and an envelope she had given him earlier, long before he tied his shoe.
Caimon crumpled the envelope—still filled with her letter—in his left hand and placed it on top of the wood. With a match in his right hand, Caimon struck the side of the matchbook and watched the flame immediately appear.
“Quickly,” Caimon thought. “It is quickly that a match is filled with fire.” Just as the flame crept dangerously close toward his fingers, Caimon leaned over and watched as the flame stretched itself from the match to the letter, like a bridge between two lovers. Or two strangers. Once the letter was lit, Caimon stood.
He closed his eyes and felt the heat of the letter begin to grow as it linked arms with the pieces of wood he had gathered from the forest floor. Soon, the fire began to melt the breath that gently rolled from between Caimon’s lips. He lightly bent his fingers into fists, his fingertips touching the inside of his own palm. He felt the skin on his hands and wondered why he hadn’t noticed before how rough that skin had become.
He could see on the inside of his eyelids the orange and red of the fire he had built: the fire made with his rough hands and matches and her letter. He didn’t want to look at it just yet but, instead, he wanted to feel it dance before him like a lover unencumbered by self-consciousness or pride. Caimon drank in the light and let the colors of the illumination paint a masterpiece inside his mind.
Enraptured by the freedom of the flames and the heat of the fire against his shoes and legs and face, Caimon leaned back his head and sighed a message that flew into the sky, “There is nothing wrong with not knowing.”
And without seeing the sun begin to rise, Caimon knew the day was new.
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025
Poem: The Path Widens
A meditation on how people grow: slowly, sideways, and almost never on schedule.
In teaching acting, you learn that most progress happens quietly.
Not in the moment a student secures a role, but in the moment she finally makes a choice no one suggested. Nothing dramatic. A shift of breath. A decision about when to look away. A line spoken with intention instead of hope.
Parents ask me when they should know whether theatre is a good path for their child. They mean well. They want a timeline, a benchmark, a sign that reassures them the world can still be predicted. Adults love prediction. It keeps the fear at a reasonable volume.
But acting doesn’t depend on prediction. It depends on attention.
A student gives more than she takes. She listens longer. She works without being asked. These are not qualities that make announcements. They don’t trend. They barely register unless you’ve been watching the way a gardener watches new growth: alert, but never frantic.
Younger students arrive full of borrowed enthusiasm.
A favorite movie. A character they memorized line for line.
At that age, the self has not yet solidified enough to have a motive.
They imitate because imitation is how they understand the world.
It’s not my job to explain their “why.”
It’s my job to give them something sturdy to push against.
I learned this long before I ever taught anyone.
When I was five, my uncle removed the floaty from my back and told me to jump into the pool. He said he would be right there. Adults often say this. Sometimes it’s true. Sometimes it’s more aspirational than factual.
The first time, he stood still.
The second time, he stepped back.
By the end of the afternoon, my floaty lay drying on the concrete like a gasping fish.
That is how learning works at its best.
You move toward someone who trusts you can manage the distance.
Then the distance widens.
A simple object left drying on the concrete carries its own questions.
What does a beached object imagine?
That this is the edge of its usefulness,
or that the next body of water will be waiting somewhere farther on?
Even a stranded object suggests the truth: every stage asks something different of us.
Parents want to know when their child is ready for the “path.”
But the path is not an announcement.
It is a series of small decisions, barely noticeable except in accumulation:
a student opens her script earlier in the week,
rehearses with a friend instead of scrolling a phone,
asks a question that requires thinking instead of guessing.
These things don’t earn applause.
But they build a life.
The work goes on.
The child grows.
The deep end waits, patient and unbothered.
And the path widens without saying why.
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025
Poem: The Thousand Deaths of Canton
Canton died on Monday
And then again on Friday
And in between
A thousand other deaths
All in a row—
His breathing shallow,
His passion stretched wide
Like a well dug for water supply
Now a brimming
Hole.
Canton’s misery has a name—
A she as you may have guessed
With brownish hair and
Bluish eyes
Anchored to her soul,
Her voice sounds
Like frogs chanting
In the night,
A melody Canton
Extols.
Her name is Sienna
Like the color artist’s mix
When simple red
Promises nothing of
Complexity
In its parts—
But complexity
Is the only way
To convey the
Whole.
She walked into his life—
No, she swam instead
Like a pirate
Fallen out of a ship
Whose pockets were filled,
Whose lungs nearing empty
Needed Canton’s
Breath to make it
To the shore with no
Patrol.
Canton wrapped his arms
Around her belted waist
He pulled her body
Wet with salted
Memories
To a warm and sunny
Place where
Resuscitating Sienna
Became his starring
Role.
He breathed his life
Into her lungs,
Sienna’s breast inflated
Like a blowfish
Reacting to her fear
Desperately wanting
His protection—
No, that’s not right—
His affection wrapped up in his
Soul.
Canton died when Sienna
Slept—
The world collapsed
With her unconsciousness
As though slumber
Was a distance too far to
Bare,
Not even the moon
Could console his emptied
Control.
He died when she blinked,
He could not withstand the dark
Her eyelids commanded—
Like a conductor
Setting the rhythm of
His pain and
One and two and three and
Four—
The music behind her open eyes, Canton’s
Parole.
Canton and Sienna
Clasped their fingers together
Like two pirates searching for love
Crossing a windy expanse—
They cried and laughed
And died and lived
Along the way
Two shipwrecked halves navigating
Toward one mysterious
Shoal.
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025
Poem: Consolation
He called her a corpse
Deflated her air
Rolled her body up
From her toes to her hair
And sat on her skin
Until her spirit
Became thin
A sweet smelling puff
Escaped her lips—
“I’m still alive”
Was
All
She said.
She lay on the earth
Drawn-on with dirt
The muscles in his arms
Dug deep beside
The crumpled she
He struggled to hide
He needed a hole
As deep as it was
Wide.
His sinews tore
His ligaments bore
The weight of
Moisture soaked mud
Sweat poured from his face
A frenetic pace
Fighting against the hole
In the ground and inside
His soul.
His arms fell to his sides—
Steel and wood
Now a finger
On his hand
An extension
A plan—
One last
Connection to she
Awake in the grave.
One inhale—
Peace
One exhale—
Release
One inhale—
Regret
One exhale—
Cold sweat
And his future stared.
He could not go back
Ahead was a trap—
Brightly lit
The way
Was clear
But illumination
Is not
The same as
Consolation.
He sat in his safety
Buoyant
Afloat
Stillness
Stagnation
Narration calling,
“I’m still alive”
Her apparition
His aberration.
Wires exposed
The path that he chose
Storm clouds above
Drowning out love
No finish to the start
Interrupted heart
No dreams to know
No nightmares bestowed
She leapt from the tomb
Alive—
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025
Poem: The Curve of Time
You might as well befriend the moon–
embrace her clouded peekaboos.
And music . . .
Receive the tune–
you have no time to choose–
alone in a crowd or
with no one in view.
And a smell . . .
Wafts past your nose–
what's that?
Or who?
Perfume on skin or a place that you knew?
Pause.
No need to wonder—you know who that was—
and who you are
as nostalgia winds the second hand 'round.
"Time is a straight line," said he
"It moves consecutively,
watches as it goes
behind and below
like walking on a path
that winds into—
well—
no one knows."
"No one knows,
that's right," said she.
"Simply put, I do agree.
But there's no line to speak of.
Time bends–not like a knee–
more like a finger touching its thumb
or a rainbow finding it's spherical end
and celebrating with a gentle, 'Come.'"
Time returns to the places we've been.
One says, "That memory is far."
Another, "The moment is here to stay."
Yesterday can be put down
but the nows of that day
pop up from the ground
without notice
or sound
to delight or confound–
it depends on the soiled seconds
into which it was bound–
moments become recollections and
recollections are seeds
with a life of their own.
Promises and hope
gentleness and rage
a touch, a glance
a well-appointed room
or a half-written page–
all are sown into our skin
and find their rest in
smiles and tears
repose and toil
love and loss
freedom and cost
and the way the sunlight lay across
the earth at the end or
when it all began.
"That was back then," said he.
"That is today," said she.
The Minutes listened closely,
"There is wisdom in both."
Time smiled wryly
crouched smugly and quietly
behind an Autumn tree
waiting for the final leaf to fall.
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025
Sonnet: The Final Chamber
In all your quiet ways my spirit wakes,
Like dawn that steals through shutters, soft and slow.
Oft have I wondered how your presence makes
Veil’d parts of me take courage yet to grow.
Each day my hushed and inward-seeking mind
Yields when your voice through shaded mem'ry moves.
O’er every folded fear your light I find,
Undoing shadows with the truth it proves.
You are the innermost of all my days,
The final form within my layered soul.
No ornament, nor craft of human praise,
Could name the warmth by which you make me whole.
So stand I now, my guarded heart undone,
For in your gaze a thousand worlds are one.
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025
Poem: Unencumbered
She collected recollections
From the past
As though they were
Trinkets from a shop
Where antiques—
Roughly used and rusting—
Lay waiting,
Lay trusting
Their time would come again.
Again yesterday came
But with a different name
“Today”
So she sat with her
Treasures
Stoic and measured
With a grip not to lose
For if she loosened her hold
They may drip away.
Away from the darkness
Of her previous losses
She looked toward the light
Lost her sight
At the brilliance it held
Shuttered with fear
Melted with doubt
Stifled her silent shout
With a thought.
The thought
A question
Singed with intention
Smoking
Like the barrel of a gun
Prompting her
To run
Instead of stay—
But she stayed.
Stayed in the place
Where she planted the seeds
Grass to grow
To overthrow
The things it seemed
She could not let go
Like a patient
Patiently awaiting
Death.
Death that rides
On the back of loss
That stabs at the fear
Of drawing near
“Don’t move from here”
She whispered out loud
And hoped the desire to move
Would evaporate
Like a cloud.
Clouds of then
Filled the present
A fog in this room
Invaded by the presence
Of shadows—
Not men—
Only places
They may have been
Had they stayed.
Staying threatened her breath
As the air turned white
The longing for safety
Compromised
By this encroaching night
The fear of losing
Being lost from her sight
As a struggle to gain
Awoke to the fight.
Fighting for air
She stood to her feet
Considered her options:
Victory / Defeat—
Destruction seemed easy
To fail is so clean
Triumph unknown
Invites mystery:
Shrapnel of
The unforeseen.
Unforeseen was the way
Mighty was the day
When the roots that held
Were cut away
When her voice
Unvoiced
Found the breath to say,
“Tomorrow
is where my future—
unencumbered—
lay.”
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025
Poem: Beautiful/Lies
I will tell you what to see—
Everything but me—
A variety:
First, the shape my lips take
When I smile
Then, only aspects of my style—
The ones that deceive the senses
Lower your defenses
Make you wonder
Confidence thrown asunder.
A breeze
Whizzing by your certainty
A tornado—
Or a reverie—
Where the facts
Are art-i-facts
Designed to twist
To burrow in your mind
Then to grow
Into trees of truth
Where flowers of falsified youth
And branches that carry the load
Explode into blossoms and
Inspire.
Time evaporates into years
My collection has piled
Your recollection defiled
Melted
Reshaped
Into unknown
Unsuspected, unsuspecting
Wisdom flown
From your mind
And into my hands
Like clay
Shaped, reshaped
The size of the holes
On either side of your nose
Where what you see
Is only dreams—
The ones I dare to
Echo
Deflected from the truth
Reflected onto the marquee
Like a refugee memory
No longer sure
Which way
Is home.
I will choose the color,
You will trust my hand
Not because your will is irrelevant
Only because
You cannot understand—
And—
You trust
The choices
I make
Wait for the plans
The paths
That I take
Like a child—
Hope outstretched
Faith recklessly displaced—
Still you smile
And wait to see
What you will be-come
When the operation is done
Your vision restored
To my point of view
The illusion of Truth
Wrapped inside
Like a film reel
Reflecting
My cinematic lies.
The seed is sown
The deed is done
Now water it with your tears
Blink until you make it your own
Follow my finger
First up and then
Down
First left and then
Right,
“Don’t fight
let it be
trust me
I know the plans
I have for you:
to kill the boredom
to steal the dream
to destroy the blinding vision
to replace it with soothing
fabrication and
elation
for today.
Today is all that matters.
One more spin
Your view will be new—
you will thank me
when I am through.”
“I can see”
said she who trusted.
“Thanks for your selection.
How can I repay your
close attention,
touch easing apprehension,
voice soothing
the searing dissonance of
incomprehension?”
She wiped a tear
From the corner
Of her newly installed
Perception.
She who answered
Leaned in
Close
Low
Bestowed the wages
To be collected on
Another day,
“Only three things I pray:
go further than you intended to go
stay longer than you intended to stay
pay more than you were willing to pay.”
I will tell you what to see—
Everything but me—
I will whisper in the breeze
Rolling from the sea,
Caress your lips
From a hot cup of tea,
Sing in your ear
On the notes of a melody,
Just as long
As you agree
Never
To set me free.
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025
Poem: Broken People
The broken people
Write
Of themselves
Themselves
To mend
Before the stories
Clinging to sinewy tendons
And blood-covered veins
Break the remainder
Of the broken people.
Like bricks
Pulverized by word-hammers
And spread across
Paper
Weighted so
The paper
Will not be carried away by the wind
The anchor-stories
Are yanked from below
And are gasping and
Building
Something new.
Their minds have slipped
Into the core
Below the place
Where gray matter
Sloshes
And squishes about
And their eyes
Are inside and
See
What is there
And blink Morse code
To the hands
On the outside—
In this way
The stories are told.
The broken people
Choose not to walk
Though
Walking is easy
On feet that are strong
But movement against
Wind might seem like
Progression
But sometimes
Movement of the hands
Moves
Them
Further along
Than feet ever could.
“Do you dream?”
A fellow asked
Who smelled of Vodka
And beef
Whose face
Looked like it dripped with
Paint
Too thick
And crusted on
Forgotten
By the touch of
His painter’s hand.
“I dream,” answered
The broken man
Whose feather pen
Moved faster than before.
“How do you dream,”
He asked then he stumbled,
“With no head to call your own?”
He laughed at his question
Like old women
Laugh at dolls
When dementia
Has taught them
That dolls are flesh.
The broken man
Wrote on
And thought about
A song
He heard in his ears
Long ago
Many years
Before his head fell
Into his core,
“I see the crystal visions
I keep my visions to myself
It's only me
Who wants to wrap
Around your dreams and
[I wonder]
Have you any
Dreams
You'd like to sell?”
The broken people
Tell of themselves
They also tell of you
And when they
Cast
Silvery questions
Into the ocean of
You
It never is in vain—
For they will not
Throw your stories
Back
But
Instead
Transform them into
Something new
And then
You
Move through
Fingertips too.
© Jill Szoo Wilson, 2025
Necessary Whispers 