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It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
I exist because:
Two animals
rocked desperately
in pleasure.
Oblivious
to anything else.
(Your parents are the Chinese children
hurling themselves out factory windows.
Google it.)
I never asked to be bound
in the skin of the slaughtered.
What you never realized
is that pain makes me.
Stronger than you.
I used to walk everywhere naked
& never get sore.
I can do it again. Trust me.
Benjamin Aleshire travels the world as a poet-for-hire, composing poems for strangers in the street on a manual typewriter. His poetry is forthcoming in Iowa Review, and recently he was featured in El Mundo, in Spain, and on SinoVision TV, in China. Ben serves as assistant poetry editor for the Green Mountains Review, and will be in residence this summer at the Künstlerhaus Vorwerk-Stift in Hamburg. His artist-book of visual poems, Currency, is now available at www.poetforhire.org.
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Poetry
“Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of Eternal Glory for Thee and for Everyone” & “Publick Universal Friend Adopts a More Androgynous Appearance, Wearing Long Clerical Robes, Sporting a Wide-Brimmed Beaver Hat Outdoors”
Congratulations to Adebe DeRango-Adem & Simone Person!
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven reminds us of the radical power of collective imagination.
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