Voice
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When you talk it is not
a shimmering sensation or
a delicate fluttering of
nature’s delicate best. Days
are not here like you are –
an open sewer grate, a crushed
locust. They are smudged and flat
as a textureless dream.
Helmets worn. Grievers
with their now-permanent-grief etched
under their fleshy eyes, checkbones and chins.
I buy buttered pastries, leave them
by their doors. I hear your voice.
You are trying to reach me with an old painter’s words
of resignation and reluctant wisdom – words
I cannot make use of.
The dead evergreen in my front yard will not revive.
Like me, and these things I clung to, it must be replaced
with something of less substance, of more obvious beauty,
like a red rose bush, birdbath or sundial. Or,
I could leave it there, brown and dry – a monument
to what was once lush, gorgeously plump, once withstanding
winters, the heat of global-warming summers, green,
wondrous against my window.
I could walk faster than this, chat with the neighbours.
But I won’t. Because nothing is here but you, only,
and my feet can’t find the motivation to pick up pace.
You talk. My aura is a smog-filled season
where your sun’s rays barely seep through. Days
with stones in my stomach, rubbing against one another,
pressing their hard weight into places.
I have no drug to ease my longing. Will it be long? Years?
Will I make it through to the Fall?
Do you have more to say? Say it then, differently.
I can’t go on repeating,
where nothing shifts but these stones,
sharp-surfaced, blocking my intestinal tract, pressing
with each step, demanding acknowledgment, denied
release, a minimal hope
for redemption.
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Copyright © 2012 by Allison Grayhurst
amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst
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First published in “Wax Poetry and Art Magazine, Volume 3, Number 5”, June 2014
http://waxpoetryart.com/issues/0305/allisongrayhurst.html
http://waxpoetryart.com/issues/0305/allisongrayhurst_voice.html
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Click to access 20151023No_Raft_No_Ocean_by_Allison_Grayhurst.pdf
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http://scars.tv/cgi-bin/framesmain.pl?writers
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You can listen to the poem by clicking below:
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