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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.
Alfresco on a chairbed the woman confirms the natural.
Natural it is to be disgusted and hopeless.
Disgusted and hopeless at being related to her,
Relating to her is what keeps me alive.
Even the unfair trees and the lawn are alive.
Alive with beating life she flies in the face of
Five w’s: what when where why why?
On the chairbed she is breaking out of the sun and the lawn.
Really, out of the sun and the lawn and the trees and me. I am
Still studying, aren’t you? Whether we accept
These processes or are repulsed by them, we are still studying,
Each of us one cell in a universe of process.
Realm of the universe, hers, and realm of the bourgeois dah-dah-dah.
On the chairbed, in the sun, she’s turning yellow.
She’s part of the carbon cycle. I toe several pits on the lawn.
She’s been eating cherries and has dropped pits on the lawn.
It’s natural to have lost my breath and found several
Pits on the lawn.
Kathleen Ossip is author of The Do-Over, The Search Engine, and The Cold War.
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