Daniel Mask

Made of glass

Looking up with my head back
to the steel-blue sky.
—A voice.
Mumbling echoes—
even music now, a circus of strangers
milling like ants—below.
Against the wind’s velocity,
I heard myself speak
as if someone were listening.
When I was young, this building was taller,
or so it seemed.
Made of glass,
a few broken windows,
except the top floor—
the netting gone.
For a while this structure stood empty,
abandoned.
It felt misplaced in time,
forgotten before it aged.
I never thought I would be back up here
where the ledge still holds weight
and nothing is asked of me.

The building’s shadow drifts harsh
in the open window—
A voice folded outside, half-heard,
then heard again differently.
For a moment I leaned forward.
I lost my footing. The crowd gasps.
I was already elsewhere.
The air tasted like fried oysters—
the way I remember the beach.
On the top floor, back when, a barbershop
with a view of the sunset over the fishing pier.
From the barber’s chair, I noticed how
everything paused.
The voice returns in fixed fragments, caught
—over my shoulder half-remembered.
I lean further, not knowing why,
into the space between us.
The crowd shifts.
I smell the salt—the same salt

from the beach below the barbershop,
a bull horn blares with a gull’s cry,
—folding into the evening.

Daniel Mask has poems and a photograph published in Rattle, Gyroscope, Red Cedar Review, Tulane Review and an
essay in 30 West. He has a Master’s degree from the University of Houston and is a returned Peace Corps Volunteer. His work shares a preoccupation with being a witness to what humans hold sacred—and how that burden, often unrecognized, is processed, concealed or transformed. He finds it does not come from transcendence or resolution but from endurance.