It was more than a blackout,
a swift dullness, as if I were gonna
faint when my legs buckled underneath
me and my ears spun out
with fussy noise that grew louder
as the view in front of my eyes,
hollowed out and bleeding like water,
like ripples of water cascading
before my hands held out. It was not
sleep. It was more than lethargy, or
oblivion. It was more than a stupor
or me swooning over love.
It was an immediate force. A kick
in my bones, as thick as lumber.
I went down like a dislodged
boulder, in the middle of
the wall. Five tons dislodging
more than sleep, more than slumber
more than temporary.
– Millicent Accardi…
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I argued all afternoon today
with my Christian friend about The Rapture.
She sat with her infant on her lap
and gushed about being taken.
Taken where? Away and up.
Her hearty baby sucked on a spoon;
she said she knew it would happen soon.
I wondered why, then, I couldn’t come.
She told me because it’s in the Bible—
that God takes only faithful Christians,
their souls unsoiled, to live with Him.
She looked at the baby and echoed his babble.
I tried to imagine them vanishing before
my eyes—would they simply dematerialize,
or be lifted up by beams of light,
and carried off through spaceship doors?
Later, I saw the shadow of a plane—
like a whale’s enormous underbelly—
swiftly graze across a hilly
field, and a thought kept forming: a refrain—
that larger things above us
can only be seen through shadows,
left for us to decipher, below—
divinity found in hushes—
the rests between the notes—answers
we keep waiting for to land.…
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tell me about the first time
you asked a lover to help into a straight-jacket—
tell me if you let them pull your hair
or if you writhed like a garbage bag of birds.
i want to know all your favorite
spots on the body
to feel pain—
i like the teeth & how they ring
like a ceiling of bells when they’re hit.
i like knuckles because they trick me
into believing there are walls possible
in me. you once slipped out
of a giant’s mouth without him knowing
but came back to do it again & again.
teach me captivity.
teach me spectacle.
i want to draw a crowd.
i want to hide keys in my throat
& hold my breath
so long underwater that
the onlooker will know
i am part octopus.…
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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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