a bird woke me up going TEE-TEE-
TEE-TEE-TEE-TEE TEE-TEE-TEE
it sounded like an alarm clock
on tv, the minor annoyance
of losing what’s easily
replaced, it sounded like a
celebrated work of experimental
minimalism, my caffeinated
thoughts pecking themselves
to bits, it sounded like
when valery said a poem
is never finished. it sounded
how a poem could only end if in
terrupted i said to my partner as we fucked
what’s infuriating is its lack
of variation. it doesn’t move
but stays at one pitch, the insistent knock
of a latter-day saint, diane di prima’s angel coming
with the letter of your dimly lit
life & the angel is terrifying as poets
know them to be and opens its
beak, tearing you from a complicated
dream where you touched fluted
glass and made someone
repeatedly angry. my partner said the title
of this poem then, in the space
between my shoulder and my ear, and they were grasping
(and we would argue
about the verb of this) my hips and affixing
a small shape to my rage where
i could snatch it

Scout Faller (they/them) has poetry in HAD, bruiser, and Hot Pink Mag, with poems forthcoming in dream boy book club and lowly dirt children. Their poem “to the business of language” was shortlisted for the Surging Tide Summer Writing Contest. They live in San Francisco with their girlfriend and their cat.

Pat Steir is an American painter and printmaker. Her early work was loosely associated with conceptual art and minimalism, however, she is best known for her abstract dripped, splashed and poured "Waterfall" paintings, which she started in the 1980s, and for her later site-specific wall drawings.