just knowing a pattern is plenty. Sometimes

I need more rattle from the cabinet, more

whir from the fan spinning in the laptop

warming my twin sister’s lap—

and when that’s not enough,

I might take off my shirt and press

my shoulders against a refrigerator—

one of those beige monsters

from the 80s you can really feel

working for its hum.

A humming bird draws

nectar in my thoughts, wings beating

80-something times per second

but there aren’t many flowers here; it’s been many

summers since I stopped even listening for bees.

I know my cell phone near a hive

can confuse insect signals,

a natural technology too outmoded

for a message vibrating in my pocket to not

make a drone go haywire

and spiral into the grass.

Is that enough?

Then what about your Chrysler that idles

so hard the tickle scurries from thigh

to earlobe? There’s always a hymn

waiting for ears. A Tibetan singing bowl

looking for an audience. A vibraphone

begs to collide over and over

with the yarn-tipped mallets you hold.

And even when you were young and smirking

and the clerk was definitely afraid of you,

the tremble of his hand made your change clink

out the notes of a small tune

made of fear, just for you.

Do you remember the key

of the plastic kazoos in choir?

Do you remember elementary science?

We were taught to read an entire sentence

before trying to fill its blanks

and began to say umm

as a placeholder for answers, as in:

“Hearing, the only sense that is completely mechanical,

occurs when sound travels the    umm   , vibrates

your eardrum, and is amplified by the    umm   ,

which is a group of tiny bones.”

On Metal

On Metal

Hmmmmm, drags at the back of a throat

and becomes mmmhmm, when three men huddle

around a car, admitting some smaller defeat,

while not quite admitting the emergence of digital

parts means this won’t be solved by ratchet alone.

No one is happy to learn what an afternoon of chafed

knuckles, metal on skin, no longer solves. What can’t

be pulled from the steel tangle under a hood.

It’s as though they found the wrench that could set

free a bike from its training wheels only to discover

their daughter has had a driver’s license for years.

I clap the man at the center of this trio on his shoulder,

not quite hard enough to shake loose a cigarette

dangling almost acrobatically from his lips and say,

I’ll just take it to a dealership and be done. I say it as if this

is not a huddle—like I’m not a team manager plucking

the ball from my pitcher’s glove early in a game

that falls near the wane of an otherwise solid career.

Detroit’s building’em like robots now, he concedes, slams

the hood and rattles the chassis. He’s probably right,