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I made a book, made the pages from cheap, lined paper stolen from school, from the torrid leaflet left under the windshield wipers by Holy Rollers in the parking lot, from squares of plain cardboard released from the clutches of mother's pantyhose, glued in a few modest wafers smuggled from sacrament for my introduction and illuminated capital G's and M's (for 'Going...' and 'Moreover...') with the lock of my sister's once long hair, illuminated with curls of white birch bark from winter, and borrowed its central mystery from the Avon catalogue's more scented pages, stole a kind of heat from the Avon Lady's ashtray full of Taffeta Sunset-ringed butts, stole my heroine from sheets of mica near the pond illuminated from within I swear, and borrowed enemies from the smooth slate of the river bottom where it never quite freezes while I colored my book with the flush of a rabbit's ear and glued-in four leaf clovers, Bible-pressed, frail, and pages and more pages-- of ice, of the wasted softness in my father's hands, a scab, a bull's horn heated and flattened out, to make a comb and a page for my book, the skin of dust on the TV was included to symbolize frailty, the wrapper from a hamburger to suggest the pain of forgetting baby teeth became page numbers, also figures for greed, dry fronds--last Palm Sunday's--unbraided, removed from above the door became the spine, our grandfather's handkerchief and his face when he beat the dogs were spread thick to dry and then cut to shape for the spine, as was the steam off the swamp or fluff off dandelions, the damp, gray haze from winter noons that I could almost gather in my arms like an animal or a child, and the delicate ampersand of cooked sugar cooled on snow. |
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Issue #31, February, 2003 :
Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.