Poetry by Dawn Macdonald

---

Detection of an impulse to flexure in an extremity, an
integrated movement of a limb—I thought, how odd the matching of our skins, these digits
vertically positioned in the manner of a diffraction grating. Initiation of a
light-triggered neural event expressed as, incoherence/decoherence—I say

“acetolysis,” he says “fuck.”
Coordination fails. We have here some
abyssal moment of
warming.

Drivers in one experimental setup behave more recklessly in nicer cars.
Impacts occur. I’d been thinking of my body as a luxury vehicle.
Plant personnel in one experimental setup produce more parts per hour. Our
pangenome expresses everything we can’t. While words may be emitted in

sequence our mitts move in parallel. Here the mitten stands for the hand, which is itself a
multi-timescale phenomenon, a word we may abbreviate as “fun.”

---

Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon where she grew up without electricity or running water. Her poetry collection Northerny (University of Alberta Press) won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize and was longlisted for the Nelson Ball prize.

Photo by Josefin on Unsplash