Cut

I’ve cut my arm.
I’m not alarmed.
I am, you see
Quite dead.

A couple of weeks ago, I played around with short poems — fewer than 15 words or so. Haiku routinely fall under that limit, but I didn’t want to explore that ground quite yet. My friend Liz Adamschik is all over that assignment anyhow and her poems are very good indeed. I wanted to see if I could do with poetry what I had done with short stories. So far, the jury is out, but I think I’ll keep trying here and again, just to see what happens when I take a poem and reduce it as far as I can.

This poem, like “Chomp”, is one of those reductions. I hope, evokes far more than its size suggests.