This ballyhoo tastes like shenanigans streaked with rust and cream. I am the kind of woman for whom the strabotomy was invented, but I prefer to squint. All the fuss over black t-shirts and guitars makes me want to pluck my own plectrum.  I’ve grown sleek on clods of earth and rainwater drunk from a red wheel barrow. I sit around the yard, the yard sits around me. Green tendrils nose my hips, a plant imitating an animal imitating a plant. I rediscover the longest muscle in the body, the sartorius, as I put on someone else’s pants one leg at a time. Flex and rotate, sex and substrate. I fit into you like a tenon into a mortise. I put the ant in anterior and the femme in femoral. On days that have an R in them, I stride across glacial drumlins like Ecstasis.

Tanis MacDonald is the author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking while Female and four books of poetry. Recent poems have appeared in Grain, CV2, FreeFall, and The Phare. She strides about in Waterloo, Ontario.