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wise words
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What is the difference between genius and stupidity? Genius has limits. - Albert Einstein.
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| Letitia Trent |
9/5/02 |
Mid-August
By now the grass is pale
and trampled as a hotel carpet.
The sickly-sweet of rot
is bleached from the roadside
cat bones.
In sleep the sweat-coiled fringe
of your hair brushes my cheek.
It is seaweed curling and uncurling
at the ocean bottom, a ribbed tail
with fluted edges.
I wake
under the slow turn of blades
that push air stale as breath
from a long-closed mouth.
I shut my eyes against the gray gift
soaking through the window edges
and floor-boards, eating
all the gradations of dark.
When permanence came
When permanence came,
like heavy blankets tucked
around our chests, we didn’t
know what to do. I handed you
hot cups with both hands, didn’t
raise my voice. You cut your meat
into chewable pieces, kept a hand-carved
bat (for security) sleeping under
the mattress like a bedbug.
But we both wake sometimes,
before the bread trucks come clacking,
watch the gray light sneak
up the bedroom wall and bloom,
clean and unwavering, into heat.
A Visit
His look of supplication for the many
shared jabs, the acid-burn of certain
words, cowed me to silence.
I took his bag of pulp-fat tangelos and navel
oranges. They don’t make them like that in Texas
he smiled. They rolled heavy in my hands.
Tonight I rip the skin back, smooth
in its separation from the meat, and push my nails
between the sectioned gaps. I break the milky film
stretched over the pulp, juice runs down my fingers,
filters into the dry cracks mapping my knuckles,
the cuts. But that’s not why I am crying.
bio- Letitia Trent is an undergraduate student living
in Oklahoma with her husband.
© letitia trent 2002
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