Fool Enough
I feel personal
doing my own thing
I forget the details
handling them
Can’t help I’m led by the ear
pinched by it
I take my attention
to distraction
as a kind of willpower
I want to be at least as ongoing
as a steak on a string
new as anyway
and no better for it
Inside’s the longest way to look
not at the Moon but at Buzz Aldrin
whose mother’s maiden name was Moon
Whose idea was it?
It strikes me simply
and thusly
each day how it is
The excerpts
the signal
the whole of it
How where there’s light
there’s heat
and where there’s heat—
you’ll know it when you feel it
I’m trying to tell you
the rest of it
RACHELLE TOARMINO is the author of the poetry collection That Ex and several chapbooks, most recently Comeback with Foundlings Press. Her poems and essays on poetry have appeared in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Electric Literature, Iterant, Literary Hub, Salt Hill Journal, The Slowdown, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in poetry at UMass Amherst, where she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is also the founding editor in chief of Peach Mag and the founder and lead instructor of Beauty School, a new independent poetry school. She lives in Buffalo.