House Call

A knock at the door: it’s the boundary technician—

Dr. Transducer glides out of the blue

and into your pulse, come



to recalibrate your peaks and valleys.

Gloved in hiss, he unfolds the bolts

of your voltage, fiddles



your knobs and bones, bones

your spectral entrails—and deduces your output’s

plagued with fits of hysteretic



backlash. Whatever you utter

is noise shaped, a dizzy signal. The doctor’s

got the fix, and it’s a doozy:



he cleaves you to a graven

waveform erasure. He tunes you to a frequency

that lacks you out



then blows. The door swings

and bangs you shut, clouds pressed to the roof

of your mouth.