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Image: Ted
The ossature of this living moment slips
Beneath your skin, unspoken
Or unbroken without allegory, and if I must now give in
And animate my zodiac’s scales to stop weighing and move
Or be carried by your archer’s compass arrow, which even now
Points inward to an x-rayed sky, so that lodestones
Instead of iron carry oxygen through you,
I will, and if I am waiting on where you will carry you
I am also waiting on a fellowship or job or book deal or death
So that I can barely balance all five on my senses, and,
Even now, I know there is another waiting,
An anxiety that would require a wasted sixth sense to comprehend
Or another cone of vision, a patina of violet
Sitting on violet, or the patience
Of a zygote of an angel, so quick and far off is God’s next thought,
And the little day we’re forced to break and measure.
Corey Miller has an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and was a Philip Roth Resident at the Stadler Center. Other work has appeared in Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review Online and elsewhere.
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