WORRYWORT
I pull a card and make a wish
Sipping horseshoe decanter—
I must have licked a toad
The scalpel snips the flesh
Silver nitrate for the growth
Matchstick for the tissue
The flesh cauterized Singing
defiant speech from the tip
of my blackened tongue
Three stitches holds me in
Waiting for a cryptic message:
It’s exactly as we expected
The inside of a garlic clove
A remedy imprinted with
the signature of its scourge
The root of it remained
Virus feeding on mutant genes
Stuttering Philomela
I spill my gut feeling
A voice on a screen insisting
The light in you is all I see
WHICHING OUR
Fortune distributes boons and woes
banishes those who demand too many boons
So marks a third of my life which seems a sliver
the further I slither from it
and all the silver baubles are shaken down
It was neither ham-fisted nor pussy-footed
Yet I felt its heaviness And and and
Even as I moved through its corridors
There were riches and sorrows and sorrows and riches
The song’s the same; the chorus repeats
In the early hours of the recent decade
a defunct email account alerted me
with registration for a class I did not take
toward an attachment I did not open
to memorize and perform, as an audition
A night fretful with worries
from Old English wyrgan to strangle
Seize by the throat and tear
So it goes The hangman in my throat
What music embedded In its skipping track
Cassidy McFadzean graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently lives in Toronto. She is the author of Drolleries (Penguin Random House Canada 2019) and Hacker Packer (PRHC 2015). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Journal, BOAAT, Diode, and Prelude.
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