The First
I entered empty through the cockleshell,
foot first protruding, the snail of my cockled
heart. The first of my heart is this pump.
I am the glistentrail that circulates.
The water never starts new; it’s our net,
the one we’re in since we were a gleam
in space’s eye, in the black hole
at the centre of the shell’s whorl.
Open
Gods made us with windows to see how we’re doing inside.
Otherwise we’d be rocks, with no way in and nothing to eat.
We’re open.
My parents’ bookshelf headboard must have birthed mine.
Books basically were my pillow or maybe were reading me.
I was asleep.
As per quantum physics, animal behaviour, and time travel,
how do I know my feelings don’t change when I watch them?
They are in a field.
Legacy contaminants interfere with my qualia. One quale
for each foreign molecule. My thoughts leave their own trail.
Its head is compromised.
Semiaquatic crocodiles warn infrasonically, closed-lipped.
Open though are their mystery pores, sensing something.
Nonlocal relations vibrate.
Straw
Someone shoved straw through the mail slot,
or the stuffing’s showing again at the seams.
Things seem stable, but those are conventions
and realism’s the white picket picking white
picket onward. I was tried by the fence post
and deemed loosed to the yard. Now my home’s
heart’s flammable, all hearth strewn by stalk.
A straw-home’s set up to take down as enemy.
If I only had a brain familiar
in this genre, or a beast to feed.
Desideratum
Live every day like you’ll be some age’s Aristotle.
When all we wrote goes broke in binary zeroes,
what’s left might be ghost energy marking mental
space us ancients hold: no digital record, so
all we write is lost, and all we keep to self, stored.
Its clasped hoard reminds of a new generation’s
resized song. Taking in material leaves scraps.
Dale Tracy is the author of the chapbook Celebration Machine (Proper Tales, 2018) and the monograph With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience McGill-Queen’s, 2017). Her poetry has appeared in publications like The Week Shall Inherit the Verse, The Goose, and Puddles of Sky’s illiterature series.