Three Poems – L. Misch

 

How It’s Made

I.
Neither of us suffers our winters well.
In November, I begin to watch old episodes of How It’s Made to pass time.
Soon, I’ve seen so many that I can recognize the mechanical origins of any object 
visible from your bed
Their industrial seams are the lines on a palm
revealing pasts full of lathes, injection molds, conveyor belts.
Soon, I can predict the lame discovery channel puns:
Today, on How It’s Made
Blackboards: chalk full of fun facts!
Smoked Salmon lox, stock and bagel!

You play days of Starcraft II,
zipping wildly between spawning grounds, and factories, and battlefields,
your only movement the seizures of your fingers on the keys,
the futuristic twitch of the mouse cupped in your palm.
You escape the stillness of our new winter
by building planets inside your screen
where you command armies with the spasms of your hands.

All my moving parts lock against each other,
shiver with the anguish of a stalled machine
I start to stink of broken zippers and jammed gears.

The finger width of water in the jar on the nightstand
is slowing turning to the taste of dust.