For today’s poem, I picked up the nearest book, turned to page 17, and wrote down the first word, every seventeenth word after that, and the last word. That gave me twenty-two words, which I divided into pairs, each of which provided the first and last word of a line. Poetry by number?
Seventeen
remark on the way we hold
the line, with only perhaps
a faint idea what happened before
but maps were never
for us: they weren’t
something we turned to
I have no answers—I
can only stand here,
doorway agape, while she
prays to every foreign god
I’m the one to make it so
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