One thing I learned fast
being married,
he advised over lunch, is that
we can’t share toothpaste.
For 42 years I’ve rolled mine up,
nice and neat, while she can’t even
manage to cap the lid.
The entire conversation I imagined them standing
divided at their bathroom sinks. And when the talk
turned toward other rooms, I tried not to follow–
too young and new to understand anyhow.
I heard a story as a child
of a farmer gifted a purse
that never emptied of coins
and of a widow from the Bible,
her oil and flour that never emptied
of Elijah’s promise from God.
We usually brush our teeth to give
the other a polite hint, to
not ruin the mood.
And against all upbringing and experienced advice
I keep the damn lid open
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You’ve outgrown me now
escaped my serpentine cell
yet your sweat is still
shackled to my flattened film.
Decomposing on your twin-sized bed,
the sun crisps my crevices
scavengers subtract my molecules
but I still remember how it felt
to wear your shivers balled
into adrenaline hands.
– Crystal Cox…
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I look down at my mug. I don’t know why she wanted to see me. I don’t see any sand on her shoes. Somehow we started arguing about themes. Her eyes green-blue, a brew of pine needles and lake water. This woman who was never my teacher.
I ask her how her summer is going. She is occupied with travel and poetry. Taking some beach time and riding her bike. Just mind the barometer. You can’t reduce a poem to slicing baloney, her hand slapping the table. A glass sheet separating vintage theater tickets from her palm.
I’m thinking of writing about levitating desks and helium breath. Myths where clay people use heat to mold faces. My summer isn’t going well. I wanted a rain of sunflower petals.…
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When asked about their favorite Pink Floyd album, rural Americans,
the religious right, and most CEOs respond quickly with The Wall.
The rest of us ask, “Why are you asking us that?” and get no answer.
Good fences make good neighbors. A wall is bigger than a fence.
Would a wall, then, create even better neighbors?
Good question, I think.
What else should we ask? If we don’t ask, we’ll just get told.
Let’s see. There’s the Berlin wall, but that one got torn down.
The walls of Jericho – there was something going on there…
Anyone remember? Mention them anyway. It sounds good regardless.
How funny that something like a wall, the posterchild of practicality,
can become instead the symbolic child everyone fights over
for custody.…
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I hear the whippoorwill
at the bank of the river.
Your body floats along
covered in arrows.
The fletchings blend with the cattails
as the sun goes down.
I’m sitting here on your horse
like a throne, watching this day end.
I remember your voice
from long ago. You said, The body
is the greatest country to serve.
Its cause beats in your chest.
I’m building a fire
with old blankets and pillows
to muffle the other sounds.
I’m thinking more
about containment now,
just like you said. I bend an ear
to the ground. Nothing.
Even the birds are quiet now.
Live closer to the ground, you said.
I put a root down in the warm spot.
The growing time has ended,
but maybe something.…
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Just seconds after my grandma passed there,
a tension broke. When a spirit rises
from a body, it somehow grows
stronger, stiff, and then it splits in two.
In the same way our fingers still curl
when relaxed: what is it we’re poising for,
our whole lives? This is not a question
to ask right away. It comes much later on,
out of the hospital, in the aging summer
when you thought you moved past
those sorts of things. I tell myself the dead speak
in verse, if they do speak. If a body in the hospital,
just passed, has something to say, it would be
a closed fist: ready, ready, ready.
– Brendan Bense…
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a girl wore pajamas to look her age halved
and gutted for its hard-to-reach testaments
to a body that awakened and grew in the night-light
that now contoured the face of the bathroom mirror
with the aftershock of the worry that she was home alone for the worse
that she was inside while her mind turned out
but a creak from the staircase caused her jaw to slacken
and bloat to its over-glory when it didn’t put words to fear
right then she put a shadow to the noise and a towel to her mouth
to anesthetize the area before it could scream or do wrong
by the man who saw the light from the second-floor window
as a signal of a challenge left alone to be overcome
but then he saw the girl exit the bathroom like her bones needed longer to fuse
before she was more than a cavity for this silence to decay
so he gave her that time and an apology before exiting the way he came
and she waited until she remembered to walk
before she descended the stairs that strained under her fresh
weight until she saw the mosaic of her front door on the ground
that her bare feet were tempted to walk across
as a rite of passage from her broken home
but she stood in place until the siren-sounds
replaced the rising screams of heat
warning her to sleep through the night
– Julia Feinberg…
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