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Issue 71: Fall 2025

from Furniture Music

By Drew McEwan
I redial and regard

from Furniture Music


I redial and regard 

a choreography set
to prevailing winds. Re-
work the balance, patrons.
Mark my table, its
scored grain. Drops
on a windowed leaf.
Carbon paper traces too
brace something on
some other page. This
season’s flu-prone
subjects anxious as
anything. A mountain
to arrange an outline or
stratus haze. Furniture
music for a deflating air
mattress. I standardize.
You redistribute a commute
as glottal. Glide, patrons,
glide.






Dust outlines

an encounter. Without
my patience who am I?
The inscription indecipherable.
An index of appointments
I skipped in the passion
for ill-conceived mystique.
Grunt work for a policed
cubicle. Romanticism
ends in a theory of
rooms. A border town
allegory, a call centre
aesthetic. Apps to recall
a precise profile, like convicts
of a sidelong view. This
diagram of compassion helps
no one. But still I’m
pacing, waiting alongside
weather. All facts
form an architecture in
negative. Lead, follow, or
get out of the way.

About the author

Drew McEwan is the author of the poetry collections Repeater, If Pressed, and tours, variously. She has also published numerous literary chapbooks including Conditional, Can't tell if this book is depressing or if I'm just sad, Theory of Rooms, and 2023's Recoveringly. She works as an educator and researcher in Toronto Metropolitan University's School of Disability Studies, and writes on literary and cultural representations of madness and disability from a position of lived experience.