Category: Uncategorized
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Buffalo Creek Campground
If I want to see the spirit of God in everything, I have to see it in this man who is screaming at his wife at 6 AM while sunlight edges down the shrubby hills toward our tents. Get up and fuck are the only real words I can make…
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Untitled (By the end)
By the end, we won’t remember what happened when. We’ll remember hardly any of it. The only thing that makes it bearable is all the blossoming. The trees turn white, then green. What unfolds for me unfolds secondhandedly. While they’re injecting the midazolam, I am watching little girls…
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Why I Love My Mother
earth and ocean warm water warm towel her hands rubbing sunscreen on my shoulders warm towels we washed and folded every day of life earth earth kneeling to grasp the green beans canning them steam and sweat a thousand thrift shop dresses steam in our faces laughing laughing…
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Regret
By the seaside my daughter, age seven, sat down beside me and nestled her body into mine and was still. Her shoulder fit nicely in my armpit. We sat together in the sun, looking out at the water, which was clear and sparkling, as water sometimes is. I had plotted…
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Skyscraper
Why I love clouds is why I love cities: what fills part of the sky makes the rest of it bigger. This morning in Denver the judges and lawyers gather to settle the cases and nurses smooth the foreheads of various patients and teachers kneel with the children while the…
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Letter to a Poppy
Little ars poetica, little obvious symbol, stupidly and just yesterday I took your blooming as a promise that for weeks I could walk by and be happy at the sight of you, tiny flag blazing among the green and brown of mulch and weed, the color of fire, alive. But…
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Long Black Veil
Ten years ago, on a cold dark night Someone was killed, ‘neath the town hall light There were few at the scene, but they all agreed That the slayer who ran, looked a lot like me The judge said son, what is your alibi If you were somewhere else, then…
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Having Lunch With the First Grade
I daydream while they play I Spy: purple grapes, orange orange, pink strawberry milk. My habit of attachment persists: I want this to last and last. What was it Whitman said? Full of life now, compact, visible. The teacher claps twice to make the children listen, the children clap three…
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The Famous Athlete Says
for L to become a winner you must lose so many times you forget that winning is possible and win so much you see that winning means nothing. The famous artist says I kept going. That was all. We don’t know what the artist or athlete who was not…
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Mayday Sonnet as Distorted Mirror
The melting snow proves everything that unfolds in time comes to an end. Suppose a certain number of years ago your grandmother was born. The sky swirled with pink seeds she’d grow up to call helicopters. It’s too windy: the souls of the dead must be unsettled. The souls of…
Kimberly O'Connor 