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We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
Too bad about the plate, the shadowbox, the twisted book.
The universe conspired, a felony against your face
in search of the tiny light that carves such things,
a grand piano to play, a poor painting by Paul Stanley
resembling the way I feel today,
full of rhododendrons half rotten sweet.
We walked through the dead cells twice, clubbed foot,
until I had to concede, I’ll call out sick,
though the sickness is ill—it’s the still weeds of guilt
I’ve been trained to feed with each yawn,
every ruffled stir I tamp down with glances
at the working sky for any sign of a white moon sweet rot.
I know it when I hear it, but did you see what I said,
the moth of my words tattered, a harp banging
at the bulb of this cold blossomed forest?
I bend on glass knee looking up; you are someone else too,
when you want. We are one bird behind one bird,
one bird behind one laughter, one breath behind one rib,
one silence behind one handwritten mask,
one scalp behind one spine, one dawn behind one skull
opened by one bullet, one skin, not us, then another,
with long bones reaching one question,
the one certainty we know each other with, embarrassed
or proud, snowed in or lullabied, skulls throughout.
Amy King is author of I Want to Make You Safe and co-editor of the PEN Poetry Series.
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