Poem by James Ogden Sharpe

Andante

This cannot have been

Unreal. There were two

Playing one cello. One

stroke gave into the other,

caught by the other

like the kiss we call mouth to mouth—

one pair of lungs

breathing so the other can breathe.

The ringing, faltering C between, made new

each length of their chest, simply

a matter of timing.

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James Ogden Sharpe is a PhD candidate in English currently at work thinking through how the internet and related technologies have shaped rhetorical politics in the global north. Outside academia, he’s a practitioner of the kinetic art known as “tricking” as well as a mystical form of Christianity.