It keeps me limping in these clayey, foot-
tamped cuts, working my way through lilting shoots
and thorny boughs that look like stanzas. Bare-
foot, I feel warm sensations in the deep
ruts left by long-gone waggoneers, whose cold
words cling, frost-like, to the echoes of my
heels. My throat swells shut from allergens I’ve
kicked up—my lozenges are almost gone.
I limp along, lopping tops off fiddle-
head stalks and snapping twigs like pencils. I
catch my breath. If only there were something
fine to say, some words to mortify and
strangle all dispute. What would that sentence
be, that line to shut down all the lies
they made us con while sitting in hard chairs?
Who makes these rooms so small? Won’t some Samson
come and bring the walls down on them all? Or
maybe just some Sam, whose curly locks get
shorn before they grow too long and get burned
as both offering and threat. Don’t prate. Keep
your limbs spry and your adjectives to a
minimum. Make sure one push topples all.

Max Cavitch is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also co-directs the Psychoanalytic Studies program and edits the prize-winning blog, Psyche on Campus. His books include American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (Minnesota, 2007), Psychoanalysis and the University: Resistance and Renewal from Freud to the Present (Routledge, 2025), and, forthcoming from Punctum Books, Ashes: A History of Thought and Substance. His scholarly articles, poems, fiction, essays, and reviews have been published in dozens of journals and magazines. He can be found on the Web at: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/index.html.