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POETRY - ISSUE FIVE

Ansatz: Confronting a Shard of Glass

ZOË HITZIG

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Did this fracture off that cocktail shaker? 
The one with docked tails leaping over hedges 
to follow the hounds only to off their riders in- 

to a morass? The one with riders walking back 
to the stable, days after first dark after first cast?— 
encountering the tracks of a stag on their long 

walk back the conundrum of cooperation settling over 
one by one by each daring defeat daring to defect. 
The housekeeper left a note. Says the shaker fell 

and fell on her head, second time, so sorry. 
She is sorry and don’t we own many hundred 
cocktail shakers yet mix our cocktails 

in tall glasses with a fork. What does that suggest 
about the tone of your latest apology, or mine, 
about the texture of our wrought-zinc bar top,

about the taste of the curling peel in your 
fifth negroni. What does that suggest about 
pretense. About the stag hunt. The answer matters 

but we have a new blender. This shard will fit 
in the blender, will blend down to fragments, 
splinters, particles, dust, will taste good 

if I add crushed ice. Glass is liquid after all 
and these horses were frozen, frozen 
because the hunt has no end nor maxim, the hunt 

is not a hunt, it is a dance, a dance charging 
toward self-deceit with guns and hounds 
to settle into a still, sad, now-fractured unreality.







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Zoë Hitzig will soon finish an undergraduate degree in Mathematics & Philosophy. 





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