Schematic
Inside the machine is another machine which refers to the machine enclosing it. So he touches her hand, and the image of a child emerges.
*
The steel ratchet in the wind: she felt it against her corneas, pressing precisely into the metric eye sockets, turning, tightening.
*
The elevator kept trembling: the mechanism out of key: but the riders held their eyes fixed on the dial, the reassuring arbitrary numbers.
*
Under the hood where gear meshes integer, in the hamster wheel of the heart, a singularity appears, an homunculus, a social security number.
*
Wreckage washed ashore, fragments of fuselage and cowling, seat-backs, oxygen masks, and hermit crabs remade themselves of metal and bone.
*
A rat in the dark attic at midnight, bolt-cutter teeth incising insulation. Black wire, red wire. A spark. The pianist’s hands stop playing.
*
The train enters the tunnel, great piston breaches the oily cylinder, clockwork tide is driven to foam on the rocks, and the marriage is over.
T. R. Hummer is Pariah of Creative Writing at Arizona State University, and the author of 12 books of poetry and prose. His next poetry collection, Ephemeron, will be published by Louisiana State University Press in the Fall of 2011.
