Look,
if you stand at
the top of the stairs
that lead up to the bedrooms
and look straight down
it’s a two-story drop
to the basement floor.
The railing seems barely enough.
I fell once,
sneaking down for a drink of water,
just a few stairs, enough for a bit of a bruise.
Not bad.
We all fell down
those stairs,
one way or another.
Mom’s high heels and shows for rows of rapt teddy bears.
And, of course,
that one fall
we have all heard the story of:
Dad reaching out
to grab her arm faster than
that one time he swam out to get the inflatable taken by
those rare Wasaga waves,
and then the shoulder dislocating.
We found the
sling once,
stuffed in a box in the old bedroom closet,
remember?
Now yellowed and greyed and bloodied.
I thought it looked like the Shroud of Turin.
And all this
time
the railing was there,
the basement floor below,
and Mom
standing at the top.
“Iphigenia” does not appear in Whispering Gallery (Assembly Press, 2026).
Dani Spinosa is a poet, scholar, educator, writer, and a computer programmer. She is sometimes an adjunct professor, a software developer, a digital and creative project manager, a co-founding editor of Gap Riot Press, President of Canthius, the Managing Editor of the Electronic Literature Directory, and a member of the editorial collective for the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 5. She is the author of two books of poetry: Whispering Gallery (Assembly Press, 2026) and OO: Typewriter Poems (Invisible Publishing, 2020) and one scholarly book: Anarchists in the Academy (U of Alberta Press, 2018). She has published several chapbooks of poetry and several more peer-reviewed journal articles on poetry and technology. She lives in beautiful Wasaga Beach, Ontario with one beautiful man, two lovely cats, and one very silly dog.
