A Theory of Four Walls
by Aaron Lelito

Stepping out onto the street
—self and other—
to look for the cracks
suspended in bodies

and how real they seem

in the moment you realize
that breaking the egg is both
an expression of avoiding extremes
and the creation of a series
of successive
defilements.

Ask how much you are responsible
for anything that happens:
a bird narrowing into curved space,
the darkening of a room

a staircase leading down to an exit
so that stepping out onto the street
—self and other—
can reconfigure us finally

as a big moon rises up
overlooking a flat lake, flashing
as if for the first time—

So let’s drop the story:
the cascades
calls
chants
spindles
redactions
transmissions

and watch for the cracks
that have de-solidified

a hard surface
that didn’t drop very deep.
And if we can be honest about
our history of missteps,
it is the things we did
to survive in the past
that we need to dismantle
to thrive now.

~

The Immeasurables
by Aaron Lelito

The world in granularity
is our gentleness.

When speaking to stone more precisely
brings us into the meadow

the question of cutting
a nest from its branches—

creating a sky
eliminating a life—

softens us into
the cerulean swirl

spikes our awareness
of carrying the cut all this time.

When an old etching undulled with distance
peeks at us through the leaning spruce

we awaken its secret into
reciprocated light

and remove the circumspection
of our black tread within our black mud.

The work of our reassurance
is immeasurable.

V

This is how we go on:
swallowing the world whole,
pulsing the foothills
in anticipation of
something above us
something else under

Touch is, after all,
the only sense
like two wood pieces tilted
toward each other, an inverted V
upright as one
only as two

Like an axe handle held
and vision of what could be gifted
into exogenous hands

But we get into commotion,
the waiting and doing, the oscillations
of our day and next day and next
and what happens when someone says stop

An overturned V now flat
lying on the ground
solid as pieces, as hardness
going on however shapes do
after all the middling form drops away

Is there anyone left to agree in the potentiality
of whose next begins
and lifts upright,
the person from those years ago
so clueless, such a wreck,
unable even to keep the appearance
of keeping the appearance

or the person who sees us
as both before and after
not one, not two

~

Aaron Lelito is a writer and editor from Buffalo, NY. His micro-chapbook, Secret Meetings, was published by Ghost City Press in 2025, and his poetry collection, The Half Turn, was published in 2023. His work has also appeared in Sage Magazine, Door Is A Jar, Stonecoast Review, Barzakh, SPECTRA Poets, and Santa Fe Review. He is Editor in Chief of Wild Roof Journal. Instagram: @aaronlelito

~
Artist Statement: In my writing and visual art, I am primarily drawn to the patterns and imagery of nature. This subject matter has become a way for me to reflect on the larger themes of environment, climate, and ecology. Along with this macro view, however, there is the micro—my personal relationship with nature and the world around me. There are restorative, therapeutic, and transcendent aspects of interacting with the waves, flowing water, leaves, and branches. To me, these simple patterns have a deep resonance with the transformations that are a part of the human condition.

~
Featured Image: Aaron Lelito, 2022.