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Colleen Abel
Self Portrait as Jaw X-Ray
The infection’s mottled dark
inside the bone
like the composition notebook’s
marbled cover, your name
written neatly on the front
in your best script.
And all the things inside
are best kept: the words
that will spread and spread
until you are sick with them.
To go back and tell
the girl you were to hide
her tongue behind her
milky teeth--
silence is that health-white there,
arresting shadows.
Caryatid With Arm Blocking Entry to the Tomb
You envy, mistakenly,
my endurance. I have nothing
you do not also have:
the stone-cancer
of efflorescence, the decay,
the city’s sulphurous lechery.
But you, who, like death-masons
make poetry of your own unbecoming,
I envy you. You know pity,
at least, and the dignity
of solitude and hands
that mean to soothe and not
erode you.
Devolution
From this throne, thorny with velvet
I crawled on all fours down.
I took the brain-crown
ringed with slimy jewels
from the unhinged skull.
Scraped rough my knuckles
by dragging on asphalt,
slurred to blurred
my speech. Last,
I divested a watch, my rings.
The useless human things.
Home
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