No Good Thing

A lean, unflinching poem that examines what remains when hope is stripped away. Sabel writes with the precision of a man who has seen too much in courtrooms and life to bother with false comfort. The poem interrogates desire, outcome, and the strange weight of wanting things in a world that rarely delivers. There's no melodrama here, just the hard grammar of disappointment and the strange dignity of naming it plainly. For readers who find false optimism unbearable, this poem offers something rarer: the solace of being seen in your cynicism. It captures a particular American voice, terse and knowing, the kind of verse that feels like a confession overheard in a dim bar. Sabel's legal mind gives the language an almost contractual clarity, each line doing exactly what it promises and nothing more.