Excerpted with permission from Wolsak & Wynn.
I
cars crash. Omagh. Wrists are slapped. Omaha.
Nothing happens not willed in a haptic universe.
Were you to decode our red-herring DNA – escape
accumulated rubbish of omnibus Sandman,
Gandalf & Saruman,
Verses by Salman,
Siamese Dream on vinyl,
cassette & double-CD, the
animal pets, our unarticulated selves
(the Innominatum Os of us) –
such loss would leave me light-headed yet,
clothed in rubble to ground me:
rough judgement pressing on raw nerve
until it’s like listening to a fucking headache.
Could such stasis be wished for, lifeless words writ
onto plasmic existence? If so, silence this lisp of spirit,
steady this teleological stutter for,
sometimes I misread words ...
Their children are grown does not scan as their kids are now adults to me
My first thought: how are they razed?
Are they hand-picked at birth or,
pared by secateurs instead?
What We Know So Far Is...
II
The Irish for harvest is Fómhar, (it also means Autumn).
I say, Autumn, you think, Fall, as in:
we harvest what autumns from the trees.
Either way, less bloodshed come time to reap:
meme protects the disease.
Let me store Fómhar in my cheeks ‘til Spring:
this thing I’ve taken to building is all beauty
no bone, no anatomy, just slivers of truth lit-up from within
by amnesia struck on the flint of repetitive punishments.
You might liken it to bruise but peruse the back of older pages
rough to the touch like pock-marked revisionist lumps
cratering inner surface of skulls where edit and idea land to
bubble up – homesick, empty and drunk – like reverse-phrenology,
nephron-deniers shredding filters to stem the flight of ideas,
like throbbing skulls on stilts, like turtles
twisting over limerick’s worth of worms, like
snacking serpents shook loose and spread across fields:
the itches they scratch will weep and leak – erupt if left undisturbed.
What We Know So Far Is...
Dr. Conor Mc Donnell is a poet and physician at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. He is the author of two collections of poems (most recently, This Insistent List) and three chapbooks. His poetry has appeared in various Canadian and international publications as well as noted medical journals such as JAMA and CMAJ. He is an associate professor at the University of Toronto and editor in chief of Case Repertory, a Narrative-Based Medicine Lab publication that seeks to engage and promote the voice of the patient in collaboration with their health-carers. He is a frequently invited international lecturer on pediatric perioperative care, error prevention and opioid stewardship, and he is current vice-president of the Canadian Pediatric Anesthesia Society. Conor works weekends at Sellers & Newel Second-Hand Books in Little Italy, Toronto, where they have words for people like him.
Publisher: Wolsak and Wynn Publishers (October 7th, 2025)
Paperback: 8″ x 6″ | 90 pp
ISBN: 9781998408269
