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It’s true in life things happen once.
Sparrows quip like flat stones
skipping on the bay. Walter Pater wrote
that beauty insinuates as rhyme, songs
turning words into pictures.
Already it is tomorrow, or
two hundred years ago.
All possible relation
precedes us as a realm.
Though there is no fluctuation
in the strength of this compliment,
alienated bitterness is now
our industrial ivory tower.
Fear is the new money.
In secret times arithmetic
perfectly symbolized the sun—
the romance of train travel,
lakeside lemon-cake carousels
unevenly revolving on pins.
Applying the rule of proportionality
to analogical judgement, still
the swallow calls
across spotted water, singing
A la lay—
Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle’s most recent book of poetry is Close to the Art of Those Fearless at Sea. He is the publisher of D Press books and the editor of the poetry journal Dear Bear.
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In her new book, Danish poet Olga Ravn writes with open love, pity, and compassion for her strange yet familiar creations.
Draconian individual punishment distracts from systemic change and reinforces the cruelest and most racist system of incarceration on the planet.
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