By Donna Lewis Cowan

Inspiration piece

It is what you wanted: to be emptied

and filled. Still it surprised you how

easily you came undone, how simply light

laid down where your mind so long

forwarded its furies, the stilled heart

that planned ahead, rationed, failed.

Now it is ahead of you, the trigger

of a need you didn’t plan for, titanium-lit

in the dark skeleton, crystallized by voltage.

You imagine it keeping you within bounds

like cruise control, binding the inevitable

heart-race in its endless loop –

or is its job to keep up, not decide? –

making your life linear, as if your desires

were riding the scales programmed

in code, to be bucked off at any time.

You think you were saved for a reason,

even found Ararat on a map

so the degrees of latitude and longitude

could help you believe. That is not our world,

we would be the ones left behind.

With its fish-bone creases your scar

resembles a fossil: the evidence that closes

the case, but that further evidence can erase.