Contact Forces

By Dawn Macdonald

Some people don’t like their food to touch.
 
Some like to rub up on the corners of buildings—can’t turn the block without squeezing the stone.
 
           Like the way we used to run our hands through the grass when we walked in the ditch
           beside the old road, keeping clear of cars, wetting palms on seedheads. A kind of okay to
           the things that are stuck in the ground. We like them, and they can’t get away.
 
When I was a kid I tried taping my thumbs to my palms to find out what it would be like to live without opposability. I should have been clued in by the difficulty encountered in taping down the second one. Then spent the afternoon swiping without grasping.
 
Touching is bringing things into contiguity in space and time. The forces in operation in this problem are electromagnetic. However, we typically represent them as arrows which may be resolved into components. Contact forces may be described as tension, compression, torsion, or shear. The coefficient of friction will assume a different value depending whether the objects have begun to slide relative to one another. Frictional forces cause energy to be dissipated as heat or sound. That’s entropy workin’ for ya, as a good friend of mine used to say.
 
Some people are a fan of the one-pot meal. Some like to let their fingers do the cooking. Some would rather they needn’t eat, the none-pot meal, would feed their bodies slowly to the air.

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Quickness

By ​Dawn Macdonald

Did you ever hold a frog in your cupped
closed hands, she asks? It’s like
that, only, you know,
right on top of your bladder.
 
The frog was
rot-colored, leaf-veined. A splot
of bonefat, a wriggling towelette.
to hold was
shock, thrill, contact,
other, murder. trying not
to murder. to be so gentle
a trap. a house. an observation
tower.
 
from here you could see, I said,
so far. If I let you
out. you kick.
I
like frogs.
I like the way
     ) when I open (
it jumped.                   

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11 Conversations

By Dawn Macdonald

1.
your neighbour was jealous of your lobelia
but you didn’t know you had a garden
 
2.
I found a spider on a leaf and you found another one;
I said, perhaps they have some kind of relationship
 
3.
I called all my goldfish Nicolas Bourbaki
but you didn’t think fish needed names
 
4.
tongue huddled in the corner of my mouth as
soundless as the tongues of paper clips. just holding
 
5.
I said there was a lacuna in your argument;
you said it sounded like a butterfly
 
6.
I’m sorry I accidentally used the Kali Yuga laundry cycle;
I guess it shredded our clothes and beat them with skulls,
but look – this one pair of pants came out Versace
 
7.
your voice against my sternum:
your voice was my voice
 
8.
hush, you said. you shouldn’t
say those things. mmhmm, I said. mmhmm
 
9.
o— 
—o
 
10.
the window
closes the door
from across the room
 
11.
only the rain is still talking to these trees​

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Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she was raised off the grid. She holds a degree in applied mathematics and used to know a lot about infinite series. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Canadian Literature, FOLIO, Grain, The Malahat Review, Riddle Fence, and Understorey.