Poem to Play
It continued to haunt, in its electro-stripes and
late your saying intervened, adding blue
to the triangle like a screen. This
system which couldn’t echo and failed to
orient the true barrier. A long thin line
from their penultimate year
or the pavilion they’re casting around.
Copyright © 2015 by Hannah Brooks-Motl. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 12, 2015, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Poem to Play’ operates within what might be described as flash: not necessarily insight, but a moment of unexpected alternative, or alternation—a suddenly-something-else across your vision or feeling screen. Technology gives one analogue for this phenomenon, memory another.”
—Hannah Brooks-Motl
Hannah Brooks-Motl
Hannah Brooks-Motl is the author of The New Years (Rescue Press, 2014). She lives in Chicago.