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Poetry

All this day: a gift
of abstraction. The trees
sway with it, murmuring box this up,
this fifth day of this fifth month,
as if to say, You’ll need it
when you’re gaping like a fish
for kindness, for this day gave you
emptiness and the permission
to feed yourself by choosing
not to fill it.
_________So I made myself
vacant, old sweater on a hook
and heedless as running water,
to forge of myself
nothing, so as to retrieve
nothing, neither from my old
ragbag of stumble and trip
nor from the creaky dead, my giant
pair of windmills whose battles
blotted out the sky.
______________This time, I
blotted out the sky. Who needs it—
big blue nothing scribbled with shredding
faces, streaked with white chalk.

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