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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.
You are in the zebra crossing,
Moving into the tornado green morning,
The shabby irradiation
Of sunlight seen though the hint
Or rain about to be. Death is
A jerky reversal of forward momentum.
Back into memory. Into a cereal bowl
On a table decades ago, the color of an orange
Aspirin for a fever at age four
That produced a heat-filled forehead hallucination.
Think of a hive made of glass, all the bees,
Theoretically at least. Describable but not all at once.
That's my mind and you
Are doing all the things you ever did all at once.
There are so many
Of you. Many more than several. Thirty-seven
Years of behavior. Nothing terrible
Has happened as yet except the uneven drone
Inside is an announcement that there will be something
Like a sting only much much worse.
Mary Jo Bang, professor of English and creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis, is author of The Last Two Seconds: Poems and a translation of Dante's Inferno.
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