This: my daughter’s purple palm-sized
vibrator breaking over & over again:
charger, prongs, buttons, its own rhythm
of frustration falling, no — flung
across the room with a bang that brings
us running. How to explain in 30 words
or less on online return & complaint form,
the requirement, the necessity, the Maslovian
need for the vibrator to (shall I thesaurusize?)
judder, throb, pulsate, quiver, shake, tremble,
for someone, this one, my darling daughter
whose brain, already broken by stroke, cannot
figure out the sequence of this before that,
whose lover left, who’s left
with this purple palm-sized
plum of dissatisfaction and
finds herself inter-
rupted
Again.
Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes, lives, and caregives on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people (Ottawa, Canada). Thanks to Firefly Creative, Merritt Writers, and not-the-rodeo poets, she has work in The American Literary Review, Citron Review, The Forge, Literary Mama, and Prairie Fire.