Dawdling Toward Eventually

Vincent Hostak

November 2, 2025

for my daughters

She in August, her in June,

they fell into place — late:

the first and last stanzas of Summer.

They were also the hardest to write.

For energies yearning to be born, 

they took their own sweet time.

Despite their mother’s urging,

chocolates and late-Spring walks 

around a dreary mall’s perimeter

tremors were slow to become earthquakes.

August and June mapped lazy boulevards 

dawdling toward Eventually.

When August greets the soccer field, she

persuades a tiny guard to eat clover leaves

and dance with her beside an empty net.

June coddles skeins of handspun wool

steeping in a bath of indigo.

She hangs wet cords to dry, spools more.

They tend gardens of peppers and peonies, 

things obeying slower rules of time

as they bend light from green to red.

I have just one lens with which to view them both.

It corrects nothing that I see. 

This is as it should be.

I’ve one timepiece to measure their movements.

It runs slow to swift, like them.

They are never late.

Vincent Hostak is a writer and media producer from Texas now living near the Front Range of Colorado south of Denver. His recently published poems are found in the journals Sonder Midwest and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and as a contributor to the TPA. He writes and produces the podcast: Crossings: the Refugee Experience in America.