Typewriter

by Olga Vilkotskaya

A beautiful machine
in the act of inking. The squid
accomplishes more
but with less precision. (Still,
our human feat is grand.) Animals
are all trial
and trial again. The human kind
just has a way with error. Consider
thought: beside intention,
it will disagree. Ink intent,
it falls flat
into place. The squid likes
his own dimension.

Olga Vilkotskaya is a graduate of the University of Washington, where she published in Bricolage, the on-campus literary arts journal. She’s the recipient of the Arthur Oberg Prize for Poetry and the Innis Arden Friends of the Arts Scholarship. She lives and works in Seattle.