By Bruce McRae


I’m writing this at gunpoint.
A windy night, I’m writing this
because I don’t know what else
to do with my hands.
It’s half past nine or midnight
and I’m writing this sentence
as fast as I can.
Once, I owned fountain pen
and wrote with an abandoned flourish.
Now I write with a stick in sand.
I’m writing this with a finger,
with a shard of broken glass.
Blood for ink, ink for blood,
I’m writing this in a windstorm
and thank you all for joining me.
There’s a voice in my head
and it’s saying ‘write’, it’s saying
‘tell somebody something beautiful’,
each word a frightened bird
being flushed from the bushes,
each letter a photograph
taken in the distant future.
Every sentence I write
is a little red fence around
the last of the moon.

Bruce McRae, a Canadian musician, is a multiple Pushcart nominee with poems published in hundreds of magazines such as Poetry, Rattle and the North American Review. The winner of the 2020 Libretto prize and author of four poetry collections and seven chapbooks, his next book, ‘Boxing In The Bone Orchard’ is coming out in the Spring of 2025 via Frontenac House.