I stand before a pitch of hillside, evening
bled dark, a pathway of insideness
swarming from that belly
of mountain, it is a soccer team
emerging, crowd shouting
and the Spanish lesson emphasizes
the pronunciation of jugadores.
Not like doors, the mouth too round:
ladders and dogs will get there –
Something you thump your tongue against,
something that sits against your teeth and rolls
to your throat –
the shape of the tongue is a monster
of sharpness that must prick at the roof
where there are no windows. Only widows,
which my son tried to understand yesterday,
confusing divorce with death but sensing
that the consequence is to be alone
and we veered
to what comes next. Heaven— who told him that?—or
maybe you, living, remarry, or live alone in shade
under apple trees with a German Shepherd
thirty minutes from downtown.…
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I pry up the bright coin of its lid. Behold — the destroyer of shirts, the speckler of grand pianos. True, I have turned the furniture to ghosts, and I have spread out The New York Times like a sidewalk along our walls. None of it matters. I have always believed too deeply in the steadiness of hands. I should know by now that ruin has a way of finding us, that only my toe print on the bedroom floor can prove that we resisted.
– Charles Rafferty…
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From light years away,
stars crowd the Altiplano sky.
Inside the bus, careening
through green lights, we are bumper cars:
the gnarled man in the ball cap, bouncing, eyes closed,
crumpled grocery bag clenched in his lap,
the girl with long wet hair, rocking in her single seat,
a book too close to her face, crying,
and the thick man in the white-white long-sleeve shirt,
radiating garlic and cooking oil, one hand
tight to a seat frame as he stands,…
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Years before Mother shut herself
in the bathroom with Clairol Ruby Rage
and a flask of double-malt, a man
was stealing blond girls from yards.
She threatened to darken our hair,
but took us with her to work instead:
we clicked teeth on articulators
and judged their bites, twirled rope
wax over the blue flame
of the Bunsen burner. Mother pulled
our hair into knots, but some escaped
into the fire. Singed, reeking, it curled
into itself like a thirsty field of wheat.
– Katherine Fallon…
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Flower girl in white cotton
and white petals, look at them rot
in the aisle, like bruises
on ballerina heels,
she’s all cracked callouses
and pink skirts, a porcelain doll,
she is skinny but her tears are fat as cherubs.
They let the doves out of the box and
put the pictures in,
the dust will fall like feathers,
make a veil.
And your old clothes stretch
and your new clothes shrink
and you go back to the beginning.
– Aimee Lowenstern…
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Ok, fine, at 35, I will rise from this lawn chair
and kiss the sidewalk almost laughing.
For now, but knowing not forever,
I will love and lean into this
powerlessness, God, be proud
of my being leashed to these urges,
like flying each of twenty crows
through two tornadoes with a bird tied
to each finger and toe. I will go on trying
to swallow all the grocery stores
because no morning feelings,
tomorrow, will forgive my mouth
its frivolousness today, so I shall regret
these schnapps-y lips less and less. Dark
manholes around my eyes, for five more years,
I will pour myself, again, too deep into whatever
it was I thought I had wanted. I will love this
gummed cement of me with a little more with tongue.…
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The next day
after the war is over,
skeletons of swallows will return.
They won’t have beaks,
and their white, hard-boiled eyes
will fly three inches ahead of their semi-transparent faces –
or sometimes on their side.
Skeletons of babies will start whimpering in the cradles,
and the skeleton of a doggy will dig itself out of the ashes.
It will try to find its collar,
but it will fail and disintegrate melancholically into mush and bones.
The skeleton of a man in a gas-mask will come out onto the porch,
and will be looking for a long time
at the skeletons of chickens digging the radioactive ashes
and listening to the pensive caving of crows’ skeletons
on the fritted skeletons of lampposts.
When he hears a soft remote honking,
he will look up at the sky, startled.…
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