you try again; ball up your fist, the hand with a tiny dove carved from marble
cupped in your carved-marble palm; its curve of as-yet-unused girl-hand frozen
in the want

to be offering whatever it has; you’re too old, throw that;

directing your flashlight beam, ball that up; the increment you need won’t be
what it’s pointing at; no one points fast enough, dark’s still your best history
lesson;

your art may feel time-sensitive

in whatever you set out to investigate, but every avoidance will attach; will be
carried, sucking its placenta, to term; just try throwing that; the good news, all
you’ve missed,

mangled, ruined, mis-rythmed and their serious hair come back —

###

Rusty Morrison’s new letterpress, limited edition chapbook from speCt! is Reclamation Project. Her books include Beyond the Chainlink, Book of the Given, After Urgency (which won the Dorset Prize), the true keeps calm biding its story (which won the Sawtooth Prize, the Academy of American Poet’s James Laughlin Award, the Northern California Book Award, and the DiCastagnola Award from Poetry Society of America), and Whethering (which won the Colorado Prize for Poetry). She is the co-publisher of Omnidawn.

“Throw Fallacy” originally appeared in Women’s Studies (TLR, Winter 2015).