A Glittering
Sarah Manguso
One mourner says if I can just get through this year as if
salvation comes in January.
Slow dance of suicides into the earth:
I see no proof there is anything else. I keep my obituary current,
but believe that good times are right around the corner
Una grande scultura posse rotolare giù per una collina senza
rompersi, Michelangelo is believed to have said (though he never did): To
determine the essential parts of a sculpture, roll it down a hill. The
inessential parts will break off.
That hill, graveyard of the inessential, is discovered by the
hopeless and mistaken for the world just before they mistake themselves for
David's white arms.
They are wrong. But to assume oneself essential is also wrong: a
conundrum.
To be neither essential nor inessential—not to exist except as the
object of someone's belief, like those good times lying right around the
corner—is the only possibility.
Nothing, nobody matters.
And yet the world is full of love . . . 
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". . .even when the universe made it quite clear to
me that I was mistaken in my certainties, in my definitions, I did not break.
The shattering of my sureties did not shatter me." ~ Lucille Clifton
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Two Sisters Swim in a
Small Locked Box
By Malinda Markham
By Malinda Markham
Sleepers dream of bandaged mouths and bright petals,
a static of bones and inelegant snow.
The night sparrow finally inhaled its own sound. What else
Could have happened? The vessel
was cardboard and twine. They should have strengthened
the moorings, should have cast
their own limbs of matter more promising
than flesh. One sleeper
mistakes a splinter for morning. The other curls
around a small jar of fear.
When the bough revoked its breaking,
the descent became nothing at all.
Two girls stood back to back, entwined.
The initial failure was a rocket-sound of wind.
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Songs of a Girl
by Mary Carolyn Davies
I
Perhaps,
God, planting Eden,
Dropped, by mistake, a
seed
In Time's neighbor-plot,
That grew to be
This hour?
II
You and I picked up Life
and looked at it curiously;
We did not know whether
to keep it for a plaything or not.
It was beautiful to see,
like a red firecracker,
And we knew, too, that
it was lighted.
We dropped it while the
fuse was still burning ...
III
I am going to die too,
flower, in a little while--
Do not be so proud.
IV
The sun is dying
Alone
On an island
In the bay.
Close your eyes,
poppies--
I would not have you see
death.
You are so young!
V
The sun falls
Like a drop of blood
From some hero.
We,
Who love pain,
Delight in this.
