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MacQueen’s Quinterly: Knock-your-socks-off Art and Literature
| Issue 31: | Jan. 2026 |
| Poem: | 95 words |
| Footnotes: | 213 words |
By Charlotte Hamrick
Incendiary Vices*
Say the past is a muddy river, say the future is a belated alphabet with which you and I might spell different things. I wanted to be smuggled, to ride past all the alarms. All night you held my alibis so softly, like taboos already broken, I forget the difference between seduction and arson. I am a girl with incendiary vices, so hungry I gnaw at light. It tunnels from the shadows, an exhausting hope. Insanity is not that we see people who aren’t there, it’s that we ignore the ones who are.
*This poem is a cento, with credited lines below listed in order of their appearance above. Links were retrieved on 16 December 2025:
- “Say the past is a muddy river, / say the future is a belated alphabet / with which you and I might spell / different things.” is from “Notes to My Nieces (Or, Essays in Fortune-Telling)” by Evie Shockley:
https://allpoetry.com/poem/14374583-Notes-To-My-Nieces--Or--Essays-In-Fortune-Telling---by-Evie-Shockley - “I wanted / to be smuggled, to ride past / all the alarms.” is from “Jewel Thief Movie” by Patricia Lockwood (Poetry, September 2017):
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/143938/jewel-thief-movie - “All night, you held / my alibis so softly, like taboos already broken,” and “I forget the difference between seduction / and arson.” and “I am a girl with incendiary vices,” are from “Why Things Burn” by Daphne Gottlieb (PoemHunter, 28 November 2003):
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/why-things-burn/#google_vignette - “so hungry I gnaw at light. It tunnels / from the shadows, an exhausting hope.” is from “Resurrection” by Sally Wen Mao in her book Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019):
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/149819/resurrection-5cb8f5cb4ca0c - “Insanity is not that we see people / who aren’t there, / it’s that we ignore the ones / who are.” is from “When the Bough Breaks” by Andrea Gibson:
https://ohandreagibson.tumblr.com/whentheboughbreaks
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