from Tours Variously

I resist the entropy of wander.

A tour, variously


I resist the entropy of wander.

note values
face the other

In weaving lines against the edges of the tour
you draw your likenesses in ink.

Smudge fingerprint psychologies as you drift on.

disinterest dictates
indefinite occupation

The performance provides the promise of closure.

Outside this sentence weather portions a sky.


To begin a tour again somewhere else
threatens to build new rooms, new buildings.





stand reflective:


senses vanish
approach language
lapsed unfurling
doubled interior


The guide is merely the one who follows the tour first.













Tours depart at regular intervals.

I exhibit rehearsal.
             I have seen this face before.

Together, you notice how the cracks in the glass
create it anew in your noticing.

reorder objects of persuasion

Did you speak before the tour began?

Did you claim a position of response?


maintain subtle distance
frame nouns
note posture



By degrees or not at all. You and I share a word.







I recollect the horizon of assembly in its dispersal.

An ornamental shade. A deflection.


monologue echo:
mock-up a patronage
affect a tourist attention


You constitute affinity among fabrics
               affect the threshold of mutual enclosure.

Each sentence’s failure graphs another exhibit.

The tour limits this moment, separates it from the next.











in following:

In answer, we assimilate the question into a rehearsal of return.
In departure, we propose a multiple “I” to reconcile our division.
Confronted with inertia’s authority we acquiesce.
Opaque sculptures of memory.
Our hungers multiple, Latinate, preserved.
Museums of light portion indiscriminate archives.
Disorientation labels us perpetual tourists.
Such colours exteriorize a surplus.
Our variations on a theme: a meander.
Memory proves our unreliable guide.
We tour variously.
We who initiated the tour’s entrance.
Stares to resist the inevitable resolution.
If only a group, or the desire to speak beyond ourselves.

About the author

Drew McEwan is the author of the poetry collections Repeater, If Pressed, and Tours, Variously (forthcoming, 2025). 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.