Arsenic Lobster
poetry journal |
Issue Fifteen Winter 2007 |
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Sleeping on the Roof at Night Richard Loveland Look up into the evenings. Look up into the mouths of tigers, the rifled barrels of the stars, search me out with your fingertips like a snake's tongue. Give me your left hand and follow me down the stairs, a silhouette among the bookshelves and rice, here an earnest tulip, there a neglected bowl. I will carry you into a new year of livestock and brushes, arrows and shawls. We will bask in the adoration of ceilings, each day spreading out before us like a banquet of meadows, each night feasting on warm asps and blood. Marry me, and you marry a dirge; the first words I hear each day throw me into mourning over the deaths of my children at the hands of robins. It's only when we've nothing left to say to each other that we can soar over the false idols of lamps and striped awnings towards a blue country of unwashed barns, silent threads of geese woven into our morning skies like the fingers of a lover's hand. |
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About Richard Loveland |