erratum
before giving in
to the knotted drift
of darkness
i swore you said
i’m sorry
but morning clarity
crept over
the stone sill
to reveal your empty
plate at our table
and i recalled you
had only muttered
i may have said
some things
© John Jeffire
John Jeffire was born in Detroit. His novel Motown Burning won the 2005 Mount Arrowsmith Novel Competition and the 2007 Independent Publishing Awards Gold Medal for Regional Fiction. Detroiter and former U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine called his first poetry collection, Stone + Fist + Brick + Bone, “a terrific one for our city.” In 2022, his novel River Rouge won the American Writing Award for Legacy Fiction, while his novel Detroit South won the 2025 Claymore Award for Literary Fiction.
The Loch Raven Review 