While leaving a party
this person put on their houndstooth coat
and looked down at their shoes
(paused), but the metronome of partygoers kept time
a couple scooted past
but even bumping the shoegaze personified
did not interrupt their ESP conversation
with the houndstooth doormat
but to be honest that blankness was probably
the pattern on the doormat cancelled the coat
and, space case, suddenly stuck in the magnetic repulsion,
their mind was erased and the silence
was more of a bubble where ESP is impossible
and psychology itself is meaningless
the cosmological equivalent of a mental singularity
forming at the Lagrange Point inside a quasar
and the wormhole that expelled them was either
a laugh in the kitchen
or the slush stain on the doormat’s houndstooth offering a sliver of detail
to the un-narrativity
and imagine if they had not come back
then the party-thrower would have had to put a guitar pedal
under the person’s toes and run patch cables to the bedrooms
and turned up the amp, turned down the stereo,
called
clear

Terry Trowbridge’s poems have appeared in:
The New Quarterly, Carousel, subTerrain, paperplates, The Dalhousie Review, untethered, Quail Bell, The Nashwaak Review, Orbis, Snakeskin Poetry, Literary Yard, Gray Sparrow, CV2, Brittle Star, Bombfire, American Mathematical Monthly, AoHaM, Canadian Woman Studies, The MathematicalIntelligencer, The Canadian Journal of Family and Youth, The Journal of HumanisticMathematics, The Beatnik Cowboy, Borderless, Literary Veganism, and more. His lit crit has appeared in Ariel, British Columbia Review, Hamilton Arts & Letters, Episteme, StudiesinSocialJustice, Rampike, and The/t3mz/Review. Terry is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for his first writing grant, and their support of so many other writers during the polycrisis.