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POETRY

This Equation

by Jami Macarty

While your body slouches off-key at wall and floor’s precise angle, all water
freezes from its wanting motion. The last of the great whales migrating from
the Sea of Cortez freeze side-by-side, a white embryo in the female’s womb.
An equation indivisible by both man and beast: the whales’ final blows, a
fountain puncturing a new hemisphere.

The gun shot resounds in the ear’s drum-belly, ricochets into your retreating.
All time makes a mockery at the point of entry, while elsewhere on the planet a
mother calls her child a mistake: the word, a bullet. Fate’s integer incalculable
from wind and wave’s white noise. The person pulling the trigger never hears
the sound.

Jami Macarty
Jami Macarty is a recipient of an Arizona Commission on the Arts poetry fellowship and has an MFA from the University of Arizona. Her poems have appeared in American & Canadian journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Verse Daily, Cimarron Review, Volt, Drunken Boat, The Fiddlehead, and Interrupture. Poems are forthcoming in Arc Poetry Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, Grain, Interim, Quiddity, and So To Speak. Her manuscript, You Is to Door, was a finalist for Persea Books’ 2012 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. Former Executive Director of Tucson Poetry Festival (1996-2004), she divides her time between the Arizona desert and Vancouver, BC, where she teaches poetry at Simon Fraser University.

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