Gravity (needle electromyography) – A Poem Suite by Monty Reid

Gravity (needle electromyography)

The data sings in my failed arm

                                                        ping and crackle
                                                        atonal

                             at the nerve ends
                              untuned

through the sensors

amplified through little speakers set on the floor

         what part of you is speaking now
         in the space of the miraculous






This guy doesn’t even have gravity, said the doctor, as the arm fell to
my side each time he lifted it up.

                 off-notes in the new space

        astringent ganglia

                              unable to reach
                              anywhere

all the needles in my arm

                                       their sensitivities

                     to the charge/discharge

and I don’t know how to hear them
but maybe you can hear them for me






What does it mean to not have gravity?

          Not to reach anyone
          not to lift up

                           in praise or song

But isn’t the body always falling

         into the earth
         its receptor sites

in this time

                          its resistance

coil hum

          of the material world






Who said anything about gravity in the first place?

Who can say who is speaking now?

          I’m just trying to listen

                      to the scatter
                     of untones

                    the stutter

                               too much for words

                               now that gravity is gone

                    of my neurons

                              extending their hands

unable to claim the sound
as something I produce






                     or just the electronic record

composed in the updated chips
of the computer.

In the gravitational pull

           I am trying to raise my arm
           to greet you

perhaps to touch you

at the limits of the world.

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from Gravity – Spoken Word by Monty Reid

Author’s Note: Gravity is a kind of a field composition, in that it tries to capture some of the disjointed music produced by a testing procedure.  It’s one of the poems in a full ms called Aorta, which is a response to various medical experiences, which have left me with a disability.  Related poems can be found at The Typescript, periodics, +doc, metazen, The Pi Review and elsewhere.

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BIO 

Monty Reid is an Ottawa writer.  His most recent chapbook is Vertebrata, from Montreal’s Turret House Press, and recent full-length collections are Meditatio Placentae (Brick) and Garden (Chaudiere), with a new book scheduled for 2027. He was the Director of Ottawa’s VerseFest for almost a decade. Twitter: @montyreid

Art: Static – Monitor, a glitch vispo by robert frede kenter (2025)