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                                                               ­   "The wind rustles the forget-me-nots
                                                                ­      In the many balcony flower boxes
                                                           ­                       And so the shrieks of foxes
                                                                ­                               lose their distance."

She’s inside,
finding her bearings.
Fiddling her earrings
around.
******* cardamom pods
White.
And smoking licorice black cigarettes
Her lips faintly popping as the smoke escapes,

                                                       ­   Pop,

And reflecting how she’s been
As lucky as lavender isn’t.

                                                         ­         "the wind sharpens the beach dunes
                                                           ­                    flutters my tangerine towel,"

                                                      Po­p, pop,

                                                           ­        "fills my little girl's glitter-gel shoes"

No,

                                                    ­      Pop

She rubs it out before she sets it down,
sharpening her eraser.
Settling her glass
no chaser.

Her cigarette smokes on its own in the ashtray
a straight grey line caught in the breezes
from the door frame and under the floorboards,
like a seismograph recording of a dancer’s hips
or like any sound man could ever consider making,
escaping up to heaven from the tip of Babel.

She takes back her black ***
Before any more paper evaporates.

                                                          -Lig­ht-
                                                         Pop, pop

Her poems are great shipping tanker oil spills
of vowels,
hoping the reader feels their lips
mouthing kisses along with it.

                                                            ­  Pop

                                                          ­                           "no one ever really tastes
                                                                ­                          one another on theirs,
                                                                ­                                                or saliva,
                                                         ­                                                       so weak
                                                            ­                                     weak as the smell
                                                                ­                                  of potent *****."

Now the wind's at the window,
disturbing a spider
abseiling slowly
and inevitably
as falling snow

                                                           ­    Pop

into the ashtray.
A lifetime of weary acceptance of tragedy.


                                                      ­       -Stub-
Playing with page placement, I wanted people to imagine there was a line of cigarette smoke running straight up it's center, or a spider abseiling down on a thread, separating the real from the poem.
R Saba Mar 2014
je ne suis qu'une femme
qui cache un enfant derrière son visage
cette fille qui me tient la main
et qui me suit avec pieds lourds
yeux soit au soleil ou au sol
mais jamais devant elle
et moi, je dois toujours
regarder derrière moi
pour faire certaine qu'elle n'est pas tombé
encore sur la terrain que nous traversons ensemble
ensemble, mais pas du tout
la même personne
je suis une femme, mais pas encore
fini mon enfance
French, woohoo! if you can't read it, let me know and I can come up with a translation. But it was written in French!

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