Want by Rusty Morrison

March 16, 2015   Want   Rusty Morrison

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. About This Poem   “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 is the author ofBeyond The Chainlink (Ahsahta Press, 2014). She is the copublisher of Omnidawn Publishing and lives in Richmond, California. Most Recent Book by Morrison   Beyond The Chainlink (Ahsahta Press, 2014) "Wood's Edge" by Brenda Hillman "Unfollowed Figment" by Lyn Hejinian "In a Station of the Metro" by Ezra Pound Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006,Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.