WHO THE STRUMMER
I am two women
who live in parallel universes
trying to break
and re-create all bonds.
She is aware of me and I, her
but our communication
a febrile ogdoad
a nadir of loneliness.
This blood-webbing
capable of rescue
yet every hour wraiths
nicker scattershot
across irradiated sand.
I’m tidal. She’s trickling, slack.
She’s shadow.
I’m shadow-caster.
I am a Fata Morgana
seen near the Straits of Messina.
Steel eye on a little lamb,
she’s Mary.
She balances a pebble
on a pebble I place on a pebble.
A sculptural beginning.
Our inroad, a table where we meet.
I slurp soba unbroken for good luck.
She teethes the noodles for control over undoing.
A mundane reality ritualized
in order for us to belong to the world.
Which of us strung
and who the strummer?
One hand
or wings?
One of us a cape as it gathers flight.
The other, cinched gaze bound to scaffold.
We want to get on swimmingly
before losing charm in this unsettled city.
In a nutshell, I gloom about broken oceans.
She rails against the blarney revealed in dead fish.
What is scarce is often what gathers.
Before divorce lovers create a commerce of quiet
seized by abstraction.
This is preliminary.
Announcers, birds of this day
come to us.
Every word you chirp
an alternative
to the not enough that stuffs me
and the die that hangs her throat.
If I am ruin
she turns her back to me.
Our split, a reassembling.
We are an in-the-world woman.
The yield, hers
and mine.
Author’s Bio
Jami Macarty is the author of Mind of Spring, winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award, and Landscape of The Wait (Finishing Line Press 2017). She teaches creative writing at Simon Fraser University, edits the online poetry journal The Maynard, and writes Peerings & Hearings–Occasional Musings on Arts in the City of Glass, a blog series for Anomalous Press (FKA Drunken Boat).