Want
crowded Monday subway its mindlessness botanical
you take the first seat claim it for your age your figural
effaced your t-shirt smelling already like somebody
else’s sweat a toddler is crashing against your leg his
mom gives him a sucker he hasn’t figured out how to
fit inside his mouth you taste the instant’s sumptuous pause
between confused and choking on surfaces you can’t fit
your lips around and swallow incentivizing short terms
that electronically spit you out your genes passed on
without you in the pool you
didn’t know how soon would drown
you
Copyright © 2015 by Rusty Morrison. Used with permission of the author.
“I started working in a tightly constrained form because I wanted to write about a desire to escape limits. But I didn’t want to just write about frustrating limitation, I wanted to live inside limitation in the work and then see how I handled it. I wanted event, not aftermath. Ann Lauterbach points out that the ‘convergence of subject matter with form releases content.’ I’m finding that this form (seven-syllable segments paired in tercets, no punctuation) creates a contentiousness in my use of syntax that forces me to diverge from my more expected trajectories of thought, and thus exposes a content with more contextual resources than I’d had access to.”
—Rusty Morrison
Rusty Morrison
