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Poetry

—-You were about to be missed forever when you
took just like that.
I can give you tight if you want tight.
At you out here to the sides of the little
dick you are

are souls not yet impossible,
not dreamt.
Though the times of their wellsprings are
how far upstream,

you’re in their grip as you kitchen-haggle,
catching yourself at your daily peeve against too many
forks in the drawer.

Ask any of my unborn if they’d take your place.
“We are not.

Allow us to be.”

That’s what they say. And for almost
all,
naturally,

the to-die-for
bump into living won’t come.
(“Let us
be,” they bid, as if

living’s worthwhile.

 

—-Worth’s virtue is that it’s
one of life’s facts.
Opposing something it’s the equal of, something amiss,
worth bends toward it. As a fine

how do you do, worth

worms its way in. Between worth’s agency
and its patient, entered peer,

so much congestion. Each had built up disquiet
added to
in this exposure to touch.
It can happen in the touching that worth
stays for awhile,

that it moves where it stays.
In Old High German, worth is ribald,
rubbing while in heat.

 

 

 

—-As if
beside itself with dread that it won’t,
bidding to live comes

about sometimes as living
when
beside it
just outside
its cell gets

messed with.)

 

 

 

—-Dwelt in at once was every smidgen
needing to be at play.
Just like that a membrane-bound

sac budded off into the gel.
Each cellular new series’s output yielding
input for the next,
there was the difference between a past and future.
When the body’s illustrious

outside showed
months on,

it had a look it kept showing.
The bracelet was for the nurses.
Its parents could tell
the newborn they were taking home was theirs.

 

 

 

—-Next to nothing,
I live farther
inside you, you say,
than you can go on making

room for.
What you’ll turn into,
what it is you’re from—that’s the nothing I’m

next to. Nowhere’s
together with it there
outside,
just one point over.
It’s their holding themselves

away for now that lets

space be.
A knob’s at hand

from the bedroom door’s vertical
light-seam. Past it
there’s food. I was of course

food for you first.
Inside,
nourished, you felt and heard
so you could come out. Against all of

me you lost with the placenta,
the things you came to see

(food first)

were slow to console.
Portable, you
looked at this and that by where you got put.
You were seen to be staying.
Sometimes you smiled.

 

Read our interview with James McMichael from this issue.

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