There are things I don’t say, even in poems, where I is not I, however it may appear. My memory’s too uncertain for memoir, my anecdotes wind themselves tight as useless springs in a drawer full of broken pocket watches, and I resist the confessional like soap breaking surface tension. There are things I remember crying about, and words that broke everything like a stone on a frozen pond, or like a plaster death mask in a sealed temple for a primitive cult that left nothing but material fragments and IOUs. It’s a matter of increasingly meaningless similes, like a bowler hat in a washing machine, or a black dog in a suitcase with no handle, or a pack of cards I throw like a rope to pull myself to shore on a lunar sea. Though I’d never say it, on good days I can tell the difference between recall and desire; but either way I—which is not I—see the same hand tying the rope, massaging life into stopped watches, and building a house of cards that reaches to the Moon.

Bio: Oz Hardwick