The Non-Witness

*2026-08-18 study - poem*

Techniques Applied

**The Hollow Centre:** the refused person is never named, never shown; the poem is the people who fail to see
**The Deadpan Line / Flat Delivery of the Extraordinary:** the events delivered in the register of a shopping list
**The name that mutates (Mackey):** the name drifting - Stay → Say → Sway → Saw → Was
**The mobile "we" (Mackey):** first-person plural, never individuated
**Compression:** the horror compressed into the plain
**The Anti-Lyrical Refusal:** the refusal as the poem's argument; the flatness is the subject, not the vehicle
**Subtext:** the non-witness register lives entirely in subtext
**Caesura:** the silence between lines as the room the reader stands in
**The Non-lift:** the poem refuses to rise where the reader expects a lift

The Poem

We stayed in the house and the house stayed.

We sorted the jumpers by colour and the colour by season and the season by who would wear it and the one who would wear it was not named. We sorted into the keep pile and the bin pile and the keep pile was larger which we felt was correct.

Stay we called her. Then Say. Then Sway when the talking thinned and Saw when the not-talking thinned and Was by the end which we felt was also correct the way a name settles when the person it was for has stopped correcting it.

We kept the door of the room closed and the room was warm and the door was the temperature of a door and we walked past it with laundry and with plates and the light under it was the light of someone we assumed was reading.

We ate at the table and the table had one chair that was always empty and we said the chair was for the guest and there was no guest and the chair was not for anyone and we sat around it the way you sit around a thing that is not a thing.

The doctor came and we said she is improving. The doctor left and we said she is improving to each other over the sink and the water ran and we closed the tap and we said it again and the tap we closed the tap.

Saw we called her by then. Was we called her. The light under the door went out and we said she is sleeping and we sat at the table and the chair was empty and the chair was not for anyone and we ate and the water we turned it off and the house stayed.

We stayed.