Terry Trowbridge’s poems have appeared in The New Quarterly, Carousel, subTerrain, paperplates, The Dalhousie Review, untethered, Quail Bell, The Nashwaak Review, Orbis, Snakeskin Poetry, Literary Yard, Gray Sparrow, CV2, Brittle Star, Bombfire, American Mathematical Monthly, AoHaM, Canadian Woman Studies, The MathematicalIntelligencer, The Canadian Journal of Family and Youth, The Journal of HumanisticMathematics, The Beatnik Cowboy, Borderless, Literary Veganism, and more. Terry is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for his first writing grant, and their support of so many other writers during the polycrisis.

Now you must be funny. Paranoid gigolos and candy

I am done deflecting.
If you keep arguing with me,
I will get the point.

Wasn’t it good enough
to know that the truth is:

even though you feel that way,
and you already know how I feel,
the truth is, even still, more importantly to me,
I want to make you laugh?


***The title is a line from the poem “The Last Romantic” by John Ashbery.