After she figured out what to do with her life
or the rest of her life or maybe just next in her life
she discovered the years months weeks days hours
minutes seconds lining up and waiting to be filled
although with what exactly wasn’t terribly clear.

Here was the question behind all the others:
what to do with this seemingly endless span that
was in fact finite or the fact that her demise was
only a matter of time and yet the exact instant in
all its startling specificity could never be divined

or the way mortality made a mockery of her effort
to figure out what to do next given her life might
end at any moment this seemingly ceaseless array
of years months weeks days hours minutes seconds
needing to be used lived spent then suddenly not.

– John Menaghan

Author’s Note: Back in 2006, I published my second book of poems, She Alone, with Salmon Poetry (Ireland). In publicity materials for the public performance (by 8 Los Angeles actors) that I directed at Loyola Marymount University, I described the book as “One Woman’s Journey from Birth to Death and Beyond.” Each of the poems was in the third person, and each described a moment or phase or mood in the life of the unnamed protagonist.

Since the publication of that book, I have from time to time composed a new poem, again in the third person, about this same woman. And I regard “Filler,” like those others, as a poem it would be appropriate to include in an expanded version of the original manuscript.

I suspect there will be more such poems going forward. Because, as I first said at a reading in Dublin, Ireland, “I don’t know where this woman lives, but she knows where I do, because she keeps knocking on my door and saying: ‘Time to write another poem about me.’ So I comply.”