Juliet Cook & Martin Willitts Jr.
Wind me up, I gyroscope,
perpetual, a spinning globe,
kinetic discombobulation
out of control, colliding
whatever is in the way,
arms akimbo,
nothing to prevent me
or slow me down.
But then every color expels itself
inside out from a kaleidoscope
because I shook it too much
until it broke.
Each of these jars contains a fish eye
because I couldn’t resist
temporarily pulling the fish
out of bowls and then shaking
until their eyes popped out.
At least I tried to persevere,
by preserving the broken parts but
some of these broken parts are dead.
Contaminated evidence of ongoing trial and error.
By examining the results, close-up,
I conclude, there is not enough plasma,
not enough dry heaves, not enough
parallel dimensions, not enough side-eyes
to justify the side-effects of claustrophobia
or cat eye marbles, or cellophane
over our eyes. Therefore, more testing,
more empirical evidence, more subjects
willing to donate their lives to this effort.
***
Juliet Cook is brimming with black, grey, silver, purple, and dark red explosions. She is drawn to poetry, abstract visual art, and other forms of expression. Her poetry has appeared in a peculiar multitude of literary publications. You can find out more at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.
Martin Willitts Jr. lives in Syracuse, New York. He has won numerous awards and prizes for poetry. He has won grants to place bilingual poetry inside of buses from Adult English as a Second Language Students. He has 26 chapbooks including two national contest winners, and 20 full-length collections including two national contest winners. He is an editor for The Comstock Review, and a judge for the New York State Fair Poetry Contest.