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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my mother, pearl, with folded hands, in rooms patiently waiting. her hands are a shimmering flame. time is precious in the inspiration. her wriggling in the doctor’s ear. a blanket for a shawl, taking three buses to the hospital in a blizzard to come get me. how is he getting better, when he believes the wall is a piano? at least he plays a real one at home. like the earnest search for the b section of a maple tree. not a figure yet, but the contours of one. he’s even composed pieces on and for the wall he calls “études for chalk piano and penumbral figures on the wall.” quite stunning really. the insistence that we be somebody somewhere impedes assembly. i’m in the middle of the piece with melody all around.…
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