I remember on the bus there is a word for a feeling 

I’ve forgotten because a stranger is wearing it: 

bubbly black jacket, hood curled over her head, 

nylon swish, and she sinks into her seat.

I thought there was a word, but maybe 

there isn’t one, just the space in the sky 

I saw in the puddle before she kissed me, 

or the hole in the reflection I had fallen into, 

the sky and me floating in it. 

I thought there was a word 

because you taught it to me at goodwill,

fingers pushing past cotton coats, 

stopping on a bubbly black jacket. “Bubble coat?”

You spread your fingers over it like you spread

your fingers over my body and held me 

the way the jacket holds the stranger’s body, 

the way the dusk holds the horizon, 

the way the puddle holds the sky 

I’d fallen through. 

I know there is a word because I can still hear you, 

like I can still see the jacket even though 

the stranger is gone, is held by elsewhere, 

like the past, like that night you whispered 

the word 

while our bodies held each other

together, stitched like fabric, or stitched 

like time, tilted 

backward, and I held your word on my tongue

as I hold this pen in my fingers. 

I remember on the bus there is a word: 

“Puffer-jacket.”

Josiah Nelson is an MFA in Writing student and sessional lecturer at the University of Saskatchewan. His work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in San Antonio Review, Vast Chasm Magazine, Arboreal Literary Magazine, Blank Spaces, spring magazine, and the Rumpus. His story “Hair, Teeth” placed third in Fractured Lit’s 2021 Monsters, Mystery, and Mayhem contest. He lives in Saskatoon.