A Finger’s Width Was All It Cost

The Gazette measures the river’s rising in no coin but a finger’s width — tonight I learn that mercy, too, is rationed in: a finger’s width.

Every bolt I finish keeps one selvage loose, left unsewn on purpose, so the dye can breathe through a gap no wider than a finger’s width.

They packed their window to the very lintel, doubled the wool at the sill, and closed the one argument cold and love both lose — by a finger’s width.

Two bodies wore the same false blush along the nails, the lips — the room they sealed would not say who outlived the other by a finger’s width.

I called an unmarked hour mercy once, before Corvus named it otherwise; I will not dress tonight’s silence half so kindly — not even by a finger’s width.

A law too proud to wait on not-knowing counts only in years, and still decides whose life continues by something thin as a finger’s width.

Zara has unpicked her own weave hunting a single flaw, and found instead the gap we leave on purpose is the only mercy measured in a finger’s width.