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Volume 13 • Number 1 • Spring-Summer 2021

Cameron Morse

Hot Wheels

Cracked knees I am
kneeling

a perfect metaphor

I am scrubbing the sofa
cushion Theo

charged in red sauce
during dinner
the curtains he grabbed

hearing a train

*

Do you ever wish
the chemo
radiotherapy hadn’t
succeeded

Sometimes yes

*

Waiting for my page
to load my
eyelids

drop my breathing
tempo of deep
forest thump
of a lumberjack

*

Infected blood
brain swell

Theo on the rampage
enfolded

my arms closing down
over him

hood slammed on my hand
blood blind ears

in aftershock
bell struck

*

Legs waving in the air
in “car city”

where I recite the names
and dates of Hot
Wheels factories traversing
China Malaysia
Indonesia

the cockroach very
much alive

even after Theo steps down
new to this

Not sure why

 

Hello Pediatric Dentistry

If framed photos
are windows
in time, then stained

time stained then
birth marked me as well

*

A droplet of Gorilla

glue reaches
for the gearbox

motivating the little toy
car from Hello

Pediatric Dentistry—
why believes my

three-year-old
we brush our pearly whites

Lint clots
the interlocking
teeth, Lili’s long black hairs

*

Our engines grow rancid
without routine

maintenance
romance

Cameron Morse is Senior Reviews editor at Harbor Review, a poetry editor at Harbor Editions, and the author of six collections of poetry. His first, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. His latest is Far Other (Woodley Press, 2020). He holds and MFA from the University of Kansas City—Missouri and lives in Independence, Missouri, with his wife Lili and two children. For more information, check out his Facebook page or website.