SHADOWS THE WORDS

How old is your ardor?
everything feels afterwards
And if echoes are shadows
The words in the storm
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
Eventually the birds become
record player. Electric & spinning.

 

Sources and Method: This cento, which is also an acrostic, consists of one line taken from each of the following poems (in order of appearance): Kathleen Ossip’s Your Ardor; Philip Schultz’s Afterwards; Sarah Eliza Johnson’s Combustion; Noelle Kocot’s On being an artist; Philip Levine’s Our Valley; Adam Clay’s Our Daily Becoming; and Julia Cohen’s In the dark we crush.

Mark A. McCutcheon teaches and researches postcolonial popular culture and copyright at Athabasca University. He has published poetry and fiction in literary journals like subTerrain, Existere, Carousel, and Kaleidotrope. His critical research on copyright has appeared in English Studies in Canada, Digital Studies, and Popular Music, among other scholarly journals and books.