Jesse Knutson - offering no return

In “offering no return”, poet Jesse Knutson likens the interior of ourselves to the epic vastness of the universe. In seven short lines, Jesse expresses the enormity of innermost thought, the expansiveness of potentiality churning just beneath the surface. In “offering no return”, Jesse told The Dewdrop that in this poem, “Outer space is a metaphor for everything most internal, unsaid, but maybe almost mused”.

offering no return

so many things remain
forever foreign far
away from everything
deep in outer space
where everything smells like
cardboard ice cream
offering no return

Jesse Knutson

Jesse Knutson is a professor of Sanskrit language and literature at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa, with a focus on classical Sanskrit poetry and poetics, as well as comparative premodern poetry more broadly. Knutsonʻs own poetry explores themes of sexuality and apocalypse, bodily dysphoria and dysmorphia, as well as everything that is irreversible. Originally from northern California, he has lived and worked in Hawaii for a little over a decade.