ALL RESPONSES |
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Angelic
I’ve finally robbed you
of your halo,
throwing it away
like a frisbee.
I boosted you up
on your pedestal,
strained shoulders,
you managed to climb
the rest of the marble
quite capably.
Don’t know how I
could have confused you
with Gabriel’s sister
when you were only
Eve’s daughter
all along.
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It’s in the eyes.
The intensity of life.
Of memory, good and bad.
Of the bad that was good.
One learns from it. Pain as truth.
Without it, a closed mind.
Unborn. Blind.
Living in a heaven that isn’t.
An empty heaven. A dream.
A blind woman sings songs
on a street corner in a deserted town.
No one’s around.
She sings about things she wished were true,
things she thought she dreamed of,
but all she knows is the street corner
and her own voice, until the people return
and she can see.
She can see and hear the men
who lie to her and grab her ass,
the women who tell her who she needs to be
to please the men who lie.
The street corner fills with smoke and neon.
The city of pain paints itself in colors of metal, earth and flesh.
The colors swirl and twist in the intersection like truth mixed with lies.
It’s in the eyes. It’s in her eyes. |
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I remember her,
the older girl with plated,
bronzed skin
After we made love
one lonely and warm
afternoon, she started up,
talking about my soul
how it was like a box
of niceness, tied
with frightened
pieces of cotton string
Later, she asked me
for a cigarette; I shook
my head
She replied that maybe
it was time I started;
been smoking a pack
a day with my thin
lips ever since
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Ships used to have—ought to
only have girls names, because I’d love
to talk about her along a green and endless sunrise and
I’d love to tell you about her scent in the spray.
I think the wind in her hair should pull me to America and
I might even let it storm, but
these days they give ships names like USS Carl Vinson and
I don’t want the wind in Carl Vinson’s hair
to pull me anywhere.
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She can't wait until it's one minute past midnight
when everything in her world will turn topsy turvy
She can't wait until it's one minute past midnight
when everything else turns to the way things were.
She simply couldn't wait
it was just a minute too late. |
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Her self portrait
paints her into a corner.
She sees her oneness
in too many forms,
story and picture out of whole cloth.
Brush stroke, word, or phrase--
she will defer to the One who knows,
who comes in a dream.
Not self, but Self. She waits.
It is difficult to lie to oneself
while sleeping. |
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There's a softness in her visage
that hardens and remind me of silly things:
Peeps fastened in a flock onto the tree
outside my coffee shop
and hardened in a week's worth of sun;
but she faces me and causes me discomfort.
I wish I could see just her jewels and their glow,
the flowers and their peach-fuzz.
However, I look at this woman who spooks me
and would like only to see her in the flesh;
to verify her smooth skin, her mellow smile,
her tuftless bosom.
I would like to see her human imperfections,
as the deified version causes goose skin
to grow over mine.
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When it comes on it’s like a drum and bugle
corps fighting its way through the lava
erupting from a volcano that no one knew existed.
Slip-sliding amongst the flow
all bets are off that your skin will burn,
or better yet fall off, so you can disappear
into the molten rock left at the bottom of the mountain.
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She stared into the sky
with an intensity she could rarely muster
for terrestrial things.
In the day, past the blue;
at night, through the stars;
into the hearts of clouds
just as the broke into rain.
She looked into the life of
what the old poets called
the firmament, squinting to focus
on what wasn't there,
or what was there just for her.
We would be talking, and she
would spin suddenly and gaze away -
when I turned to look, of course,
there was nothing there, nothing there
but the sky, always just the sky.
She wasn't fearful, nor crazy,
but I think something simpler instead -
she was expecting. And when it happened
she would be the first to know. |
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What to make of defiance?
Look away? –It no longer exists.
Paint its picture in a somber ochre?
Put it out there where it stands single?
Pure, unadorned defiance. Holy
defiance. O aureole of fire
and forget me nots. Gaze,
you passers-by, before it
burns up, before she, the subject,
shimmies out of her cage.
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the man rolled
over when
his sleep heard
thunder
and
between
the open screen/
waking
up
his fingers
wandered, touching
the black thunderhead
of a woman's curls
begging to be seen
!forty tornadoes on the horizon
yet his eyes/heart
like the sky
refused to open
and as though
the storm could
at any moment
become (again) a dream...
heat rose
like good mornings/i love yous
from
asphalt
crows made nests
like devils fumbling
over broken
organs
a nameless tulip
like a martyr
begged for
rain
a cloud and
the broad man
moved like low pressure
systems back
into position
weather between
sleep/sex
wind/dance
not even the day
after knew
as he
stretched
like sun rays
reached over
the bed
and found
a warm
imprint
in the pillow
a memory/a woman
/today |
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He was her kind of guy.
Peace. Love. Harmony.
A sweet connection.
His eyes glowed like amber, skin like abalone. Lips moist, full, nearly bursting with dark-cherry secrets. His kisses sucked her in like the dizzy mystery of the cosmos, leaving her giddy. Masculine breath brushed her cheek, opening a path to ecstasy...of the body, the mind, the heart. Her fingers tangled in the swaying lengths of fringe that hung from the shoulders of his suede jacket. Her soul melted like sugar in his hands.
"Come on home, girl," her magic man said. And so she did.
But the currents of life worked otherwise.
"He’s no good," her dad murmured. "Hair tells that story."
"She’s too young," mom added. "Needs time to grow up."
With heart tearing into raw, bleeding fragments, she stared out through the rear window of the car as the big city lights dwindled and faded in the distance, eventually overcome by the gavel fall of night.
"Sorry," her sister said, glancing back at her from behind the wheel of the car. "It’s only for a while. If it’s true love, it’ll last."
She never bothered to tell her sister that it did.
She never bothered to tell any of them.
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They told me
I could
TRUST
Them
With my
visions
of the
INFINITE
Like a
CHILD..
I believed
Them
When I tell
You what
I
SEE
You will
Not
BELIEVE
ME
You will
Lock
The
DOOR
Rob me
Of
My
NAME
And
Throw away
THE
KEY
My
Tomb
WILL
Say,
ALL
IS
WELL
AND
ALL
WILL
BE
WELL
That
Is
ALL. |
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I got the first tattoo
to show my parents that I didn’t care
about systems of belief.
Maybe I was lying, because the second tattoo
wrapped belief around my other arm --
it was obviously pointing toward something,
as much as the first tattoo tried not to.
Soon belief unraveled its ink from my hair
and transported itself to my breasts daily.
Sun signs and star calling cards came
to plaster themselves all over me, and
I became an earth goddess --
bathed in the seepage of fresh-downed tree blood
and more at home in faerie circles
than anywhere I had been before.
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| She floats through the Universe Coffee Hut and orders a tall, dark cup of twilight. A Mercury Comet carries her to the beach by the bay; she spreads her shawl on the ground where grass and sand blur. It was early AM, her favorite time, when the fiery yellow sun and shy, coy moon exchange glances in the pale iris sky. She sips the spangled twilight slow, supping when she’s connecting with something, as she does in the morning. The ocean air, waltzing in from a point where the only land is underneath deep water, cools her face, dissipates the remaining steam from her open cup, fluttering breath from a blue mother. For her, all of the elements in her life melt like a sandcastle, magic ones surround her. She warms her hands on the wax cup, feels the honeycomb dimples on the amber wrap holder, savoring each swallow down to the bitter brown molecules. In this moment, the sky clock winds down and balance regenerates. After she empties her cup of the last coffee juice, she gazes into the bottom; tiny stars shimmer among earthy dregs. |
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When I was a girl,
I saw my mother crying. She answered,
“What is wrong is that all men
are assholes!” She took herself to the attic
to smoke and cry.
I began to suspect then that her womb
was a cavern infested with golems who
lurked, waiting for any man to misstep proving
men are assholes, proving she’s right.
Proof could’ve been anything, really,
a forgotten anniversary
not calling home before staying out late
a compulsive purchase
and then it was: Well, just FUCK MY HEART, JOHN
and all that.
When John suddenly died, my mother
had no one to apologize so she
tossed bygones into a burden basket
and strapped them to her forehead. Now, at least,
she’s talking about it. |
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The woman is born
with a little fire
in the traditional place
She uses it to keep things,
to give birth
People have said
for centuries that it
is the woman’s soul
that men have moved
for it, for its gratification,
for all the forsaken
It is the woman
who controls the little fire,
who sings the lullabies
and puts it to sleep
next to her children
When she gets old, the fire
will die, and the woman
will be buried in a small field
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My religion was a stone in the sky
following me from childhood
when the first rock spoke
in my palm, a gothic weight
a mute communion.
Over my shoulder the moon
led me to wander the warp of illusion
so that on the edge of end
I don’t really know anymore
if this was moon’s kindness or
trickery.
That squatter in the pond at night
how it broke when I stirred it
told me of all the moons
shore secrets
floating in lakes and rivers,
in wells and rain puddles.
When I stop at the estuary
to look back the way I came,
reed moon lies in ambush where the path
turns to beach scrabble
its moon mask, suggests
Greek tragedy,
fireworking the surf with its tears.
I taste moon, ready or not,
in the repose of granite.
Its light trespasses my arm
quenches its thirst
with the sweat of my body
pools in my lap
or slides with the cold
skin of a snake whispering
“sister, sister.”
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Chapter One
woman discovers herslf
suddenly
she answers a knock
at her front door
she greets herself
drenched in light
I am you
she says in welcome
Chapter Two
woman discovers herself
in the darkness
in what has been heretofore hidden
it takes time
the slowness of time
she waits for some sign of recognition
som ancient familiarity
finally
I am you
she says in welcome |
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Cover a mirror and it no longer reflects
the oaks in their rumpled coats, the strands
of willow that billow like a skirt of grass.
Imperfect in its perfect selfishness,
a mirror sees only itself.
What is self in portrait
if not an image?
Mirror image is merely
what one thinks one sees,
which in time becomes
reduced to a semblance
of what one used to be,
or was once thought to be.
A book is a book completely.
No rock has ever questioned.
What lies uncovered
is a lie in itself.
This is not to complain, nor
to wish it otherwise. This
is to rejoice in sounds that birds
make calling limb to limb,
when buds pop the branches alive.
Spring does her self-portrait well.
No reason to improve on that.
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I have seen this intensity
before. Was it when you first picked up a rifle
and went to war along with the men? I’m not sure.
Could it have been the first time you looked
through a windshield as a driver, or
when you first put on ice skates
for hockey and not dancing? Don’t know.
Where was this look when your first
partner dumped you and you threw all the drawers
of the dresser on the fire pit, coals still burning
from the night before -- was it turned away
from me? I wish I could have seen it then.
Who made this stressed intense dress for your brow --
smoothed the wrinkles out so that it hangs just so --
who made you grander than the women have been
in our family for generations -- since
your great grandmother raised a family
on the plains of Nebraska during the Dust Bowl
and kept your grandfather fed -- just ask him --
he said you resemble her now, right now, this moment
as you steal the stars' intensity from the sky and
pry open my heart -- for you -- for you my lady.
This poem is for you. |
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“There is no cure for a broken heart,” he said
“Not even time?” she asked, frowning.
“You do your time.
Surrender
day by day
and God grant me …” He paused. “You know how it goes.
If only we had the wisdom without the pain.”
“What about travel?” she persisted.
“New connections, new friends,
tongue twisting language, horizons
filled with gorgeous sunsets, unpredictable encounters,
foreign tastes. Get your mind off of yourself.”
“Travel is good if you’re ready for the
loneliness that pours down like sand in an
hourglass, relentless,
there’s that image about time again…” he muttered.
“And support groups? Surely you went to some?” she faltered.
“Another way to remember you’re not the only one,
useful in case some of those broken pieces have gotten lost
and you need to glue everything back together.”
“…but friends and family?”
He looked at her this time, deeply. “Better not try to do
without them, an afternoon
of smiling at a child’s antics is worth more than all the
self-help books put together.” But she could tell he wasn’t
saying everything, held back from telling her
the way friends couldn’t know
(how could they know)
unless it has happened to them…
the black scarf of your grief
constantly encircling your shoulders,
bruised from how you knelt
and banged on your chest
trying to jump-start back to life.
“What about poetry?” She was determined.
“Ah, poetry!” His eyebrows raised.
“Here is the secret about poetry…
it will crack your heart (what's left of it)
wide open to let in the rest of the world,
the miracle of the
sublime ordinary, the terror coiled in the beast
as we understand
how precious we are, how expendable,
perfect even through our hearts are broken,
even though our songs are
warbling out of tune.”
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Ann thinks of letting out her dreds,
being loose and wavy again.
Something about him makes her
want this - him on the couch
with her mother out, the hardness
gone from his face, a lovely deflated
young man, clean and fresh
from his first shower in weeks.
Who knew he’d be blonde?
But then she remembers 5th grade
when Boom Weisner told everyone
not to come near her (and no one did),
because she burns, hair afire,
scorching tips. You could die
from touching her, incinerate,
he said. That was the first
time she’d cut herself
with a dull steak knife after dinner,
a speck of red on her upper thigh
that wouldn’t grow no matter how
she pinched. Her earliest secret.
Not even the size of a grain.
She had learned how to garden,
make them fully bloom.
“My ma works overnights. If you come by ten,
leave by six-thirty, you can stay here,
as long as you take nothing,” she says.
He’d nods, lies down on the couch,
and she tucks a blanket around him.
He doesn’t seem to mind her staring at him
from the lazyboy across the room,
as if he expects it; he closes his eyes.
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She stalks the shore at dawn
gathering only broken shells
cast off by a fickle salt tide
that rhythmically advances
then races, in retreat
rising and falling
in an unending tedium
strewing exoskeletons
in the treacherous confusion
that lay between
her breasts,
buoyant on the surface
even though hate girdles her throat
and begs for hands
to either choke off
her mask of impassivity
or stroke life back
into its desiccated interior
she loses her place
in the perpetual cycle of tides
promising life
threatening death
no longer caring
which comes next.
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Her hair was a brush painting her lips
Sanguine – delicious – impenetrable fortress
hiding razors in her mouth
She said, “fuck my pretty little heart”
I did
I gutted it and tucked it
between her breasts
A nest where moonlight wouldn’t dare trespass
secrets born to a birthright of silence
As we lay in the quiet of our bodies cooling
For the first time – I looked at her
Throat stained by the bruise of my hand
coaxing the quickening breath from her mouth
A breath softer than the beating of my heart
Black agate eyes
Worn smooth as her hands
under a steady stream
Pressure against pressure
She said nothing
It was not necessary
I dressed amongst the chatter of my mind
Flee at once
see nothing, remember less
The bed turned on its springs
As she turned expectant to watch me go
Bullet in my back
Fired from her throat so silent
I remember her more clearly now
than those years ago
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I saw her on the bus again, that crazy girl with the obscenities tatooed on her neck. She came in and sat down and I just sat and tried not to stare. There was no reason for it, I thought. No reason at all to put that on your neck of all places. And I'm a reasonable man, I'm a live-and-let-live kind of guy, but that. Jesus.
She was with her boyfriend. He had those little disks in his ear, little green plastic disks, and I just knew he was stretching them out to hold even bigger disks later. Why would you do that? And those glasses of his - delicate wire temples that diverged to leave an open triangle holding more delicate wire in an art-nouveau loop. Such stupid, pointless glasses! And those pointy sideburns! The more I looked, the more I realized I hated everything about these people. She pulled out a little tin of gum and they both took a piece. Suddenly I realized I hated gum. And I hated the way they held each other's hands. His little pork-pie hat. Her jet black pig-tails held by pink bubble-gum balls. Her stripy socks and shiny mary-jane shoes. His mechanic's jacket with Chuck in a white oval patch on the breast. His name, I was quite sure, was not Chuck.
I think I quivered a little, sitting there, enraged by their smugness. I just couldn't imagine them going through life like that, blithe fools to extravagantly embraced stupidity. I imagined their entire lives were a campaign to enrage people like me. I imagined them sitting on the bed in the morning and picking out these clothes, carefully calculating how they could further offend people like me.
Then he pulled out his iPhone, a device I simply cannot endure. He checked it, sliding a finger on the surface, and whispered something, and the girl giggled. That was the final offense. It was then an idea occurred to me, and I began to plot my revenge.
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i wonder what you’d say
about who i am now
would you disapprove like
you did so many times before
would you have hurt me
more deeply than i was used to
in the back of my heart
i hear your critical voice
i wonder who you would be
i have images in my mind
how you would have changed
as you grew older
would you be one of those
skinny bar chicks with big hair
too much jewelry
i see visions of you with black
eye liner out of place
i see you shaking like a leaf
or your head hanging down
in a dingy small town tavern
a table in a dark corner
i hear you mumbling
would you be flirting with
your daughter’s lovers
would you have tried to make out
with my husband again
would you have plastered
yourself over all our walls
is suicide what you hoped
it would be
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Her face flies apart
when you look, scatters
like starlings from a tree
then reassembles new.
That’s how I see her when
Trinity College Library
displays a model made by
a Renaissance doctor—
a pregnant woman
belly cut away showing
the child inside her
with a man’s face—
set between the rows of marble busts
(Newton & Plato & Aristotle &
Hamilton & Demosthenes & Locke.)
Not the calices on the mountain
not the cloud it wears
not the split in the stone
not the new frond
not the ear of the birch
not the footsteps of wine
not the vagina, not the beech
see her grip the earth
see her feet, her feet.
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I went to the butcher and asked what price, the heart.
He went into the back, where things rarely sold can take up space,
and came back with a heavy heavy tray,
and there they all lay, frozen—
“Which one would you like, he asked?”
After a long minute of not meeting his gaze,
I rephrased my original question.
“How do you determine the price of a heart?”
And he said with a butchers sharpness—
“Whatever the market can bear.” |
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Deep inside you and around me,
You ran searching
to see
what didn’t remain, another day;
running down deep inside, you thought to find
me my outstretched mouth opening...
alive
yet, gather up on the grass
yellow cake washing through
the coal had gone and rushed by
carved into me with a sharp knife
making life shine and real
future's promised kiss
beating at a Railroad crossing
our Union line
laying as an L cut upon the hillside,
this highwall
runs out the coal owed to them trains.
Hold the long faces back
never able to keep clean the land leftover
or my hair's colors
pouring over its spilled lung with short fuses
set a blaze to my split tongues; shifting
is my only fame
Lilies are now nameing
my heart's fist
spilling inside yellow clay
running through the downward slide
rains from inside tree line coming
my hands ceased in scrawling
drawing in the black loud water
for Lana in the dank leaves.
within my still hand grasping drink and glimpse at the water's brink
drawing up to stand
with the Saints
bleeding this apart,
its dove above
clipped....
for whom does a kettle's bottom strip
as a seam on a country road
inside down that mountain twisting
and about the shoulder's horns and tips
wild and growing
across country road you and me yourself with child Bearing: coal babies
come have a look down our mine
pitched black walked right past it
these eyes fucked
as stretched arrows
tread o'beauty defined
Virgin flower I'm finding
gathered up clippings in the long grass
a dove washing through
here:
spilling over the bank
sorryies
for what could not remain
another day after
farewell thee
its name
not so deep inside finding
the way of an outstretched door
left open West
this Cave-in of 29 sharp knives
moving the empty cars
and if, God had been not too busy
in films or kissing
on porches with those preaching: lies made for us or in dreams
my mirrors might give up more
and discuss the ways to take my veins
and shake the hours:
these black faces never able to keep clean
nor the hair just right
perfect eyes, experts with short fuses
smoldering
for the Dark Angel to kiss sadly
here, as if as a receipt, I signed.
bringing it home: names of the dead standing: written on the wall with your heart's fist
just above her gaze
an aura
seeing
an inside
yelling
for each other
a telling
just above that treeline - it comes
to this mountain
cold hands upon my treasured chest.
Taunt your bow drawing back with these arrows
treading
our shots to the dead
shouting
black loud water
eyes eyed up from below
twenty nine voices of the mines
rippling
you Saints within our stone walls shanks
whispering
what are these blackened curls below her mouth caveings
revealing
the coal train - Govern'd thorny tips
to the West
bounding
her breasts and shoulders
bearing the stillness to come within us
claiming
backwards out of the mines
hot breath of contempt to owe the train's angels
beating
beyond the white Cross
here we are to stay
spilling
calling us to stay
on this Mountain
mist
we wait a band apart, a dove above
clipped
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This morning nothing
more than warm rain;
not like last night
with its thunder
and arrogance
Yesterday,
God was a man
She is in this rain,
holding her azaleas
in her wetness;
her beauty erupting
under her blue dress
She tells me everything
but life is beautiful
that all I need to do
is notice little things
like this and I too
could live another
thousand years
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You move between darkness and light continuously,
a feat man cannot understand.
Life bronzes your skin with
joys that warm, tears that scald.
Remember the security of thumb pressed against lip?
You hold a present unopened as life finds its way to the womb,
a secret only you share with your body,
a pain you will forever carry, always covet.
You are beauty and stability
finding faith in veils of nothingness,
you dig dirt for answers
scrape life’s mess from beneath your fingertips—
there is no choice.
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I wasn’t on the ground an hour before
devouring a sushi roll with the top down,
bent against the midnight wind, being
told by my brother at a full shout about
the bar we were about to visit— the only place
in the Cape open till 2, how the bartender is smoking hot and
has the biggest pair of fake titties you’ll ever see—
with a piercing suspended like a teardrop right between them,
try not to stare.
The wind broke his words into letters and carried them
to the backseat before they could
reach my ears where they
were held down
with the greasy paper bags &
parts of plastic toys.
I could see them rise and dip like
October leaves at the intersection
of alley and dumpster.
As we parked the Jeep, I wondered if they would
be there when we came back,
having assembled themselves into another conversation
in the silence of our absence.
He was right to warn me, right about that and rest.
The bar was more like a sinking ship where
all the sailors already gave up the ghost and
staggered about as if the walls were lengths
of sea rising on either side, leaning into the
perceived pitch to discover the walls have fists that
strike out, & remembering their own
useless hands—how they can be clenched
& thrown like a baseball that never leaves
your arm no matter how hard you try.
A motorcycle backfired out on the street
& my brother jumped as if shot.
For one long breath
every drink was held at the edge
of every lip before making its way
to where all liquids go.
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Let’s Remember Will Rogers
Francine wants ice-cold fountain
soda, roadside row motels,
banjo, night fire, painted
desert. All shared with mother
road, route sixty-six. She’s like
a cowboy with his sunset,
wants west from Chicago, wants
two lanes, no more, opposites
linked together through Saint
Louis, Santa Fe, Flagstaff…
Francine craves those yellow lines,
a Willys Jeepster, cooler
filled with root beer and cheese
sandwiches, and antique road-
maps that lead to Palisades
Park , the Pacific Ocean.
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from your many portraits
any kind will do,
and from those with such
a smile,
scattering
we continue
looking in...
to find you holding onto
and drawing
such a thing, as we are hidden.
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This isn’t the first time
I looked at a picture of someone else
and thought it was me
or looked at a picture of myself and
thought it was someone else
It happens in mirrors too
not in my own bathroom of course
but sometimes in a restaurant
across the room with me
wondering who that woman is
and why she looks so
I ask him, Who do I look like?
He tells me: Nobody. |
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The night we first collided
a twister ripped through town
the rest of the world witnessed
the savage windswept trees
the hail ravaged roads
the apocalyptic cityscape
I didn’t see a thing
I'd been cocooned
in the ecstatic cyclone
of your arms
~Erica Rivera |
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