NewPoetry

Ariel Gordon

My mother accepts our invitation to dinner, rumpled
& sleepy, two weeks after
a cancer-bloated kidney was carved
out. She eats half

of her food, squinting at her plate the way you do
when you come upon the unexpected
depths of the night sky, all
the constellations

you can’t place, then suddenly pulls up
her shirt,
showing us the scar, pink
& mottled, on her side. My partner & child recoil,

as shocked by the intimacy
as the rough slice,
but I’m not surprised. It’s something I would do
& my mother fucks with me

the way the moon fucks with me: often.
But my mother’s kidney black-holed.
It sucked in all
the details—the tiny bubbles

in the morphine, my sister’s miserable
tears as she watched our mother retch into
a kidney-shaped bowl,
how the three of us huddled

around her stained
Emergency Room bed—so none of us
have to remember them. When I came out
of the hospital

the night before the surgery,
having brought her a burrito
the size of a football, having shamelessly
apple-frittered her,

the sky was overcast, which seemed right.
I could find her in the dark
by the immunization scar
on her upper arm,

a pitted satellite that hung
over my childhood.
If I had to, I could identify her
from the broken nail

on her big toe,
the flash of her false teeth
as she mutters her goodbyes
& firmly closes the door.

Spencer Gordon

— January 1, 2015

Keats, Wordsworth, AViSON, Tupac,
ex-Jackass star Ryan Dunn: they all

claimed the same sly things: New Year’s Day
was Optimized for Suicide

& Wings. It’s all sable stars & Arcturus skies,
the lonely tear-sucking Hoover of space

& that penile moon who thrives on
lovers’ pain. You Auld Lang Syne yourself to bae’s place

in cupidity’s clanging streetcar, & oh: what a fuck
day you’re gonna be. So start a New Year right

by unfollowing those who don’t follow Bing
& forgive us our trespasses, those Lena Dunham nights

of glassy apps that read, “You Better Work,”
“Fuck the Police,” & “Support Pirate Bay.”

Alright:
I’d rather be alive than dead

I GUESS, & that’s all I’ve moaned & kerned
from sixteen years of Sega Genesis in bed

& slobbing your inane numinous Tays …
So adios my tangy brothers, my booze-couched

sisties, pouring Red Bull into pizza ports to toast
no shame, an apogee, or a Something-Gate.

It’s another New Year’s Day, the bells all ringing out
like it meant something.

Gillian Wigmore

it was evening, or call it dusk.

a man held a knife to the blue skin

of the calf’s groin

stretched like a bridge across a gap

and pushed in.

there was blood, like you’d imagine it,

but also

the skin parting before the knife,

a giving in as well as the give

that is the force of the blade, so slight,

because my father is a hunter

as well as a doctor.

the steel pushing ahead of itself –a ghost knife

incising. that evening: heavy dew and wind

high in the treetops, the leaves growing indistinct,

the farmer eventually turning his truck headlights on

to ease the post mortem

and that gap? it glowed pink and then it was morning

not evening, the pink the pink of the blood vessels

in your ears when the sun’s behind you

and shining in my eyes.

there’s no coming back from what you’ve seen.

you can undo thoughts, the radio

is just the radio. maybe you know

before you know that what comes next

is indelible.

kevin mcpherson eckhoff

The great God that formed all things both rewardeth the fool, and rewardeth transgressors.
Proverbs 26:10

be grape disguised as apple or
raspberry with a heart of salmon:
pine blood, rug breath, pregenetic fallacy
………….bothness in all things

study the crib, the tree house, the club, then
crank call your Geography 12 teacher:
midnight neoNazi-wawa archipelago
………….why-not as inheritance

Angry Birds: Rio
Rovio, Fox Digital Entertainment, and Blue Sky:
new high score, play ad-free, loading…
………….reward is its own reward

turnip really tastes like rutabaga or parsnip
but chess can’t beat the finesse of pogs:
gressors ferable ience duction istor
………….everything is great, just

James Langer

It waits beyond the floating dock and harbour’s quiet calm,
Beyond inclinations of tide and lunar phases.
It’s past the bourgeois renos and open houses staged
For a sigh to come later. It is likewise out of range
Of voices cursing the city planner, his name,
His merciless resistance to our common sense,
And the fact he never existed. Its coordinates
Unknown to porch-light sensors tracking migratory patterns
Of the downtown polyamorous, who flash therapist’s scripts,
Labelled Rx, like border passes. It’s above
The humane proximity of peeler bar to rub and tug,
Up the long-faced hill that’s for giving pause to angry drunks,
And a moment’s peace, before treeless compounds
Of the derelict classes: cheap aluminum siding, concrete,
Narrow casements constructed around washouts
And an ill will that amasses in the ample spaces
Tenanted by what’s deficient, where the next break-in,
The next home invasion, can be clocked by the time it takes
The district’s active agents to burn through the last M2s.
Around the bend and past the covenant light of corner convenience,
You’ll find it luminously negated by the economies of scale
And tract housing, as each modest cross-gable fails a lost original
And higher ideal. Canted retaining walls, scant easements,
Flat-out pavement—a place that extends to everyplace else,
So is comparable to nothing and therefore meaningless. Here
Your destination’s frozen in the semblance of a hare
Enacting stone beneath the shrinking shadow of a hawk.
Up the steps, a simple knock across the double-pane,
Over the threshold, to within an arm’s length,
Where a suffering distance remains between and contains
Everything love might make of us, the good life:
Pristine, unlived, and hidden in plain sight.

Matthew Tierney

Don’t I know
a pocket square can be misplaced,
pinstripes the wrong colour—
if tungsten angst is even a colour.

Three Halloweens in a row
I went as the life of the party.
At home I’ve got every light on timer.
Twice a day the lampshades sing hosanna
and then don’t I know
to feed my bearded dragon.

‘Believe it!’ says the milk carton.
‘Cancer will be beaten in our lifetime.’
It’s been saying that
for as long as I can remember.

At my high school reunion
don’t I know
the difference between being
the smartest guy in the room, in leather pants,
and the smartest guy in the room in leather pants.

Beware the personal salutation
that falls under the rubric RE: AUDIT.
Beware the tchick after your surname
from the doc frowning at your chart.

Down the street, in the dark,
my house lit up like a close encounter.

Stevie Howell

Flagellum

In the beginning, we beat ourselves to move to the source,
the sources, the light, the food, the sex

the CNS was a tail, a spine that schemed outside, beneath
–Richard the III’s, lurching from sea

slid across boulders peppered with microbes, feasted on weaker,
those with fewer machinations

called this our home, our kingdom. Some called themselves kings
and queens, sat at the centre

of ordered but unstable scenes. The yeast doubled, quadrupled,
n-tupled, and the more we had,

the more we wanted, the less restful the sleep. We spawned arms
and fingers to snatch or stroke, handy

when you’re broken, palpated our guts to annunciate menacing
grunts, morphed vowels. Word begat

the poet. The ocean bubbled and steamed, burped up future
family, frienemies, fanemies.

In the end, we describe blatant phenomena–but with eloquence,
we slow the world down, we say, like a cud.

More than nitrogen, more than vapour, more than clay, we need me,
I say, I am the why and the because.

Anita Lahey

1.

A worker honey bee from the abandoned apiary
in the cottage backyard of famed naturalist
Charles Sauriol motors over the riverbank and plunges
into a wall of black swallowwort. One more
newfangled post-industrial invader. (It straitjackets
trees and strangles dogs.) Bring this mighty forager
a blossom all native and nectar-y, bring it
a highrise of goldenrod, an eighteenth-century
bustle of milkweed. On the double. (Where
is the ghost of Elizabeth Simcoe
when you need her?)

2.

A skate blade loops
and swirls, unwinding clarity,
movement, joy. When the divide
between water and air is cold-packed
and unmistakable, forces and states
of being may unite. An ancient

corn cob, a dropped
fishing spear, rings fanning
from a cupped palm. Ripples
of a circumspect gaze. Undercurrents
of hoeing, hewing, humming.

3.

Do giant slushy pops still exist
or have these plastic Slurpee cups
the size of watering cans been rolling
in brush by the skunk cabbage
at the Todmorden Mills wildflower preserve
housing ants, rain, mosquitoes
and spiders since 1982?

4.

The official, thirtyish, bristled chin, wades in,
angling for a grip on the fourth
body this season. Maybe the poor
chump’s better off, you know? His black
boot, a slime-slick rock, careening and fingers
flung through reedy air. Steady, okay,
wait—two hands holding zippo, nada—
Was there a splash? His walkie-talkie’s
gone under to join what fell and sank
with buddy from the bridge. Up there,
his partner awaits confirmation,
gloved fingers on the railing, round
black speaker at her ear. Give her
a Luminous Veil. Give her a single
malt, neat. Give her a moment
alone with this feat of engineering
and its larger-than-life legacy.
She wants a word.

5.

Capt. Hugh Richardson’s rages and bellows,
caught on a putrid 1834 wind, rising
from the deck of his grounded
vessel at the mouth—
The destroying cancer! Destructive industry!—
still fury and eddy with gull screeches
over the head of a repatriated wood duck
traversing the greasy pools
of Keating Channel. (The captain
curses the Don’s impassable silt,
not the tanneries, abattoirs,
paper mills, flour mills, lumber mills,
lantern factories and cattle fields
from which it cascaded.)

6.

That particular night heron spent
two motionless hours perched on a post
poking through the surface near a crack
in the concrete that encases the lower bank.
Its grey-blue bill trained on water, head feathers
ever-so-slightly rearranged by the breeze. Mourners
in the hundreds were drifting downriver
aboard kayak, canoe, rowboat, raft, reenacting
the Funeral for the Don. The chief keener,
mid-wail, erect in the bow, spotted
the stock-still bird. Fell
mute. The heron’s intentions
were clear. People stared. Some leaned
so far over to peer (like the bird)
directly into the stink, their
vessels began to list.

7.

Sauriol’s memories waft downstream
from the Forks, interrupting the flow
on the DVP. Nostrils lift,
ears twitch. Vehicles (not
canoes) bob and sway: 

the scent of the balm of Gilead—
the sweet tremolo of a saw-whet owl—
the sad trilling of American toads, so plaintive—
dozens of eastern bluebirds dropped
from a sky as blue as their wings— 

8.

A Rob Ford bobblehead is wedged
in the Y of a staghorn sumac branch
near a patch of graffiti—I be creepin’
while you sleepin’—on the underside
of the Dundas Street bridge. The sumac
were planted along the once-bleak bank
by sweat-streaked, jean-clad champions
of native species. How long before a
high wind or passing cyclist knocks
the doll free? Its painted-on eyes,
the rerouted shore: now you
see it, now you don’t.

9.

A dusty labourer from the brickworks,
dragging on a smoke; a boy
felling a cedar for his latest
ingenious lean-to; an afterschool
trio hugging armloads of trilliums;
buddy, down on his luck, come
all the way from Nova Scotia to erect
a sheet-metal shack on the Flats.
This ghostly gang follows the river’s
forgotten, curlicue shoreline, seen
only by owls and bats, reminiscing,
foraging, speculating on what’s
yet to float their way, or
surge on by.

10.

Taylor regards the clump
of promising valley clay in his palm.

From the protective shade of oaks,
Simcoe turns his gaze on a stand of pine,
sees masts for ships of war.

Davies takes a pig for a country walk.
Gooderham inspects his windmill’s lazily turning blades.
Scadding lays a celery trench, mulches
a bed for tender asparagus shoots.

Gardiner scales a backyard fence to scramble
down the valley. He scrapes his ankles
on raspberry canes, tramples
asters, maps out where
to blast the hill and shove
the river over.

11.

I don’t know what to tell you
about life along the Don. It troubles me
to imagine its wild, abundant, free-
flowing past, and how the forms of survival
I was taught to practice have left it
like a dirty, sodden rag. The year I was 22
I crossed it twice a day, sometimes more,
by bicycle, subway, streetcar. On foot,
a friend at my side. We were
cub reporters, I’d taken a call, heard
news meant only for me. He unpeeled
me from my desk to walk me home.
I might have looked down as we crossed,
vaguely noted the familiar, brown trickle
in its trench. I didn’t think of the Don
as a waterway, a succession of histories,
an altered form. The valley was
forbidding, unknowable; to live on
its eastern flank was to score
an arresting view. That morning
I crossed the river one kind of person;
I returned used-up, hollow, littered
with debris, dismal as the Don
but still moving, this way
and that, without
apparent design, braced
for my own Improvement Plan. I was due
to be channelled and dredged.

12.

An empty mickey, lid tight, bobs
and meanders, sunlight pooling
in its thick, clear glass.

A corroded nine-volt settles in silt,
kicking up a tiny, temporary, unseen cloud.

The blackbirds’ conk-la-rees
ricochet from willow to willow
skipping over a log so tattered and forlorn
it can never have stood and splayed
into branches and offshoots,
bright green leaves.

13.

Ah, here she is, Elizabeth Simcoe’s ghost—
she’s commandeered an abandoned canoe—
Canada geese are splashing and bathing—
she’s giddy with swamp gases,
summoning loons.

14.

A Tyee noses upstream, dodging
cigarette butts, coffee cup lids, Styrofoam
crumbs and shards of iPhone
packaging through waters
too warm and up, at intermittent
weirs, precisely, scientifically
angled ladders.

This singleminded chief of all
salmon no way no how voyageured
from the Pacific to this concoction
of road salt and fertilizer, storm sewer
outflow and emptied toilet tanks
propelled by its own fins. No sir. It was
caught, flown over mountains and prairies,
poured into lake water, transformed
into sport for eager anglers.

Ladies and gentlemen of the post-glacial,
post-agrarian, post-Victorian, post-pastoral,
post-industrial, post-landfill, post-
radical-environmental-activist—
ladies and gents of the new-and-improved,
Better-Homes-and-Gardens era of Don River
restoration, please allow me to further describe
the journey undertaken by this pink-scaled
fish of all fishes. This fish

was not game. This Tyee cruised
Lake Ontario’s murk, steering clear
of hooks and bait. It smelled
river. Through the port land’s rumbles
and slicks, eroded soil grit and driveway sealer
aroma, through beer cans and algae, rainwater
spiked with goose shit, this fish
heard the Don’s muted
cough and reeled

in its current. It swims hard and sure—
it belongs here now, it has thrown itself
on the mercy of these ragged, panting waters—
it aims for the source.

Jennifer LoveGrove

Knots are contagious in autumn.
They chant America, I am jealous,
or congested. Muddy rocks
in the lung. Leaf piles. Anonymous bread.

Remember to listen to your uncle.
His shadow, asleep or awake,
his walking stick. In the tower
or still missing.

Shred his tuxedo, save each leaf
for chewing. New homicides nestled
in loaf, in bonsai.

Trace each loop, rib, and knuckle.
Touch your hand to his —
in cement, then water. Cough,
then jump——

Meaghan Strimas

Seriously, who doesn’t want another poem

about the fern fronds who wave farewell,

(weeping, perhaps?) as some backpacking

sap leaves the forest for the highway.

I like nature, too. I like the birds who

shit-bomb my balcony, and I like the parks

we’ve “saved.” Good thing, for us, this greenery

exists. Yes, we do make room for the squirrels

and the chipmunks. It’s a little more delicate

with those skunks and raccoons. Still, we’re good

to leave the nests where they’ve been built.

We’ve a healthy respect for avian architecture.

Plus, it’s a real effort to climb that high.

I know a guy who claims he’s going to live

off the bounty he’s growing in his yard.

You should see the two plum tomatoes that hang

like sagging nuts from his leggy vines.

Last count–six whole peas. But why romanticize?

Phoebe Wang

The evening, served on a blue-glazed platter.

The window admits as much of the slow parade

as it’s able: white moths folding like napkins,

soaking in the sun’s drops of oil.

Clouds open their gates. Crows clock

by thick as captions. It grows late.

I, too, want to be heading somewhere.

The hours roll off the table, my four-cornered life,

out of circulation. Out of the frame.

I have more than my share. Still I reach

for any excuse to leave the task at hand.

But what can other windows offer?

Boxed herbs in a flutter. Buttery light soaking

curtains as if they can’t contain that much richness.

Behind them, the shadow-play of husband and wife,

and love sits down for dinner.

My view is selective, allowing for the unseen.

In another room, I’ve made an incalculable vow.

Darkness drops down like a double-barred caesura,

between this day and all the others I’ll toss a coin for.

Molly Peacock

…………….Thomas Crawford’s sculpture, 1856
…………….Brain Bleed, 2012

The New York Historical Society.
Huge white marble sculpture in the lobby:
“Dying Indian Chief Contemplating

the Progress of Western Civilization.”
You duck beneath him with your wobbly cane
then upturn your face toward his, contemplating

his sober view of hysterical society.
“Something terrible has happened!” you say loudly
as a teenage girl to the sculpted dying man.

“He’s so sad!” you repeat to the empty lobby
where you make a pair, a society of two
(plus a volunteer and a guard) contemplating

the mystery of the new you, brain torqued
from your stroke. You connect without history
—but with feelings whole—to the agony

of the Dying Indian Chief in marble.
Your fresh response remakes his catastrophe.
Yes, something terrible has happened—

we amble on. “That’s a very sad man back there.”
Progress comes. With a cane. Without piety.
Wake up a statue. Then repair.

Michael Prior

I meant to acknowledge what you hadn’t yet confessed.
Just as a dog will tolerate strangers who approach
him sideways and with an extended hand, we’ve let

inconveniences beget emergencies. Phones closed,
switched to airplane mode, the atmosphere returned
us to our proper sphere. How could I have known

I was still broadcasting on descent? The slow burn
of aluminum scattering that which lacks mass
at lower pressures, temperatures undiscerned.

I cycled through my states, wore an ill-fitting mask.
Regret thickened asthmatic in a chamber of the heart;
its porthole was a small aquarium. If I tapped on the glass,

bright denizens below swam in and out of the dark
like fallen constellations treading water,
about to flicker out. The impossibility of disembarking

stirred an eel in my ribs. Our departure
forgotten, ambient-lighting asked for patience, pleaded
for continued understanding, as the unclaimed future

rattled in the machine. I saw what was needed,
what I had felt: the dim glow of resignation through
the tint of night—as if clarity was time’s unheeded

toll: the porthole’s algal shrouds pulsed with the blue
of wave and wind. Who rewrote our dialogue? The same
words recalled in different coloured ink. Confused,

I thought of the cuttlefish, struggling to reflect the inane
geometrics of a scientist’s whim. A life spent matching
exteriors, while the interior remained unchanged.

Eric Zboya

Daniel Nester

300. The tough guy is always African American.
301. The fatherly anvil is always feverishly ached-after.
302. The freelancer is always busty.
303. The apartment of a sucker MC is always gentle.
304. The sucker MC is always peaceful.
305. The crank call from a sucker MC is always kind.
306. The blue-balled kind is always wrong.
307. The blue-balled nutcase is always sweet.
308. A do-nothing tough guy is always to avoid sexual contact with a priest.
309. A peaceful shy brownie is always accurately hairless.
310. The Angel of Equations is always faggy.
311. An All Cows Eat Grass is always faggy.
312. The Texan is always sharp-dressed. And faggy.
313. The red wheelbarrow is always inexorably bitchin’.
314. The red wheelbarrow is always faggy.
315. The red wheelbarrow is always gentle.
316. The red wheelbarrow is always myself.
317. Act your age.
318. Grab your age.
319. High, lame, ink, lamas.
320. I’m a uniter, not a drinker of water.
321. Up in the air, fish go and marry.
322. Raise questions about rocks only underwater.
323. The tenth time you see someone nude, you must provide your own shirt.
324. Answer and measure at the same time.
325. Out of the house a funky nectar.
326. Relax on your own ass.
327. The ass responds.
328. Leap, regret, question.
329. Where your pud goes, fire follows.
330. Shapely, piggish, make your own fun.
331. Locks littered, vents, clogged.
332. Last words come easy.
333. Sturdy canes in a made-up story.
334. Your cans frustrate.
335. The lap of loquacious, the parents of the loquacious.
336. Nudge the farmers.
337. Inchoate jock itch.
338. Can’t your dolphins lighten up a bit?
339. Grab angry causes by the thorax.
340. Filthy books hold the angry.
341. Hold on to your gold.
342. Newborn dolphins unite.
343. Go with God, question him.
344. An ode in haste sings off-key.
345. The water’s hair.
346. Many caddies at the milk counter will see The Giant Labrador.
347. Inside of us and off somewhere.
348. At the start of a fight, no prayers for one’s cause.

Stuart Ross

Big Monkey watches over me
as the blistering clouds bang
against my window and I dream
of you again and you are alive.
We are in a snow fort on my lawn
on Pannahill Road and we pretend
we are soaring through space.
The rumble of a 1967 Valiant
station wagon passing by my
driveway is the roar
of a meteor hurtling toward
earth and narrowly missing our
craft. We know now that
everyone will die except for us,
because we are in space. Except
our ship has turned into a womb,
its hot, sticky walls pressing
against us until we can barely
move our arms. We are crushed
together like conjoined twins
and because you are dead, I
wonder if I too am now dead
and I call out to Big Monkey
but he is bent over my desk,
rolling a sheet of yellow paper
through the platen of my
1952 Underwood, so intent he
cannot see us in the TV set,
our palms against the screen
from inside, and vertical hold
starts slipping.

Amanda Jernigan

Waiting in the hall
I tried to recollect
a mother’s prayer: the Hail
Mary? Now and in
the hour of our death —

not right. And anyway
what right had I to say it,
who had it on faith from my atheist
father, a locked box.
Or, rather, open:

ladies and gentlemen, you
are free to inspect the contents
of this box, ‘sickness
and suffering, hatred and jealousy …
greed …’ (yes, also hope).

What is the right prayer
for Ethan? I thought. And thought:
‘What is the right prayer
for Ethan?’

Guy Gavriel Kay

She doesn’t like being understood, which makes
loneliness complicated, though you could take the
(perfectly valid) view that all loneliness is complex,
or really simple. Either, or. She wouldn’t even
be pleased that her dislikes are understood.
She walks Manhattan streets in March, long-
striding through snow melting to slush, in new boots
bought to assuage (however inadequately) her latest
iteration of midwinter blues. A southern girl in
New York, what could one reasonably expect?
She flashes confidence in her stride, at work,
in a bar with friends, end of day, into night.
She withdraws inside, seeing them falling for it,
knowing she’s only flashing, really – another
fly façade among too many in this city.
But our own mirror matters most, has to do that,
unless we’re maybe in love and then the image offered
by the one we’ve (maybe) fallen for might mean more.
Either, or. It’s hard to fall in love with people we can fool.

Dina Del Bucchia and Daniel Zomparelli

The Rose
for Belle

What happens after
you suffer through
a beast and a wedding,
everyone, objects you knew,
changed into old flesh?

You were so smart,
I always thought
it was about books, ideas,
living life through the eyes of another,
pretending because
life isn’t so fucking great.
We want more.

I’d been dismissed too
for talking about thinking,
pressing my nose to books,
creating new spaces in my body
for knowledge.

When you’re young
all the sexy misogynists,
Provencal gym monkeys
show off their brawn,
propel beastly bodies.

Maybe Stockholm syndrome
isn’t any less romantic
than cocktease guilt.

But once you get involved
in your own fairy tale,
so meta: the magical rose,
like the kind lady’s throw
to knights, like the kind
someone in a different story
will compare to your vagina

Outdated stories.

What happens
when you’ve transformed,
when you’re delicate stained glass,
decorative and one-dimensional?

hollow ship to hell
for Ariel

You saw him on a ship
and he was destined to drown, but
you saved him and fell in love.

I was a fish too, fins for feet,
flapping on the beach only for moments
before the air burned my scales.

I broke my body in half,
footed myself into his life at every moment
until I caught his attention.

I was up late one night in his bed
air burning flesh
again, my body craving the ocean.

My body sealed itself.
Skin tightened and gills
slit neck.

I filled the bathtub with
water and Epsom salts
let my scales smooth.

Then, I slipped out
of his apartment and
sunk back into the ocean.

Now, at night he cuts his skin
to create gills
but can never stay under the water long enough,

tries to keep from floating upwards,
tries to weight his body with cement,
tries to anchor.

Jaime Forsythe

This all happens where houses threaten
to slip into the sea, where no one crosses
on the stairs or sings at the table, where
odd scraps get socked away, a sparrow
in the freezer, nestled next to
the tequila, where the street
sweeper roars by under a strawberry moon.
No matter where, we don’t wash
for days and bonfire rises from every layer
of us. Chanting by the kindling, songs morph
into visions, into sketches on butcher paper.
Compatible zodiac signs hang out
around the picnic table hammered
from a kicked-in door. Words guard us
against unwelcome thoughts and shifty
visitors. Fragile alchemy gets a baby
to sleep, powered by a looping
articifical heart. The button flickers
violet, and we have entered
the right ventricle. Thirteen
beats before the curtain drops. Our lives shift
softly every time a new one arrives,
high beams interrupting the performance
and stalling the pendulums, the inner workings.
Small fuses, we disconnect and reconnect, willing
the charms we’ve created to catch.