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We Are Entitled to Love Poor People

By William Burke
Poetry•Vol. XXIV No. 2 (Summer 2011)

We are entitled to love poor people hung in autumn:
Is there room for another hundred bodies in this field to rest like
      coal?
I’d lower them like gold leaves.  I wish they were fig leaves
      Or I wish they were an abandoned plant
No longer clamoring for seasons.  I wish they didn’t hurry goodbye,
      quit their suffering and go to the south of the eye and ask what
Our fathers had asked when they flew on the nips of whiskey.  Their
      poetry and God’s name will be meat for us to sell.
We are entitled to dry the skins of lovely women, and talk
      about the
Shit two strangers will rub on another waiting for the porch light
      to reach the lake.
A hiccup.  Indeed we are entitled to smell the smell of autumn cunts,
      and to ask the night for repayments.
Does a dream fall sickened by the dreamers?  A hostility, a fuckup.
      Can a people be born on a trap line, hooks set deep?
We are entitled to kill them the way we want to.  Let them be lit in memories.

William Burke is from Portland, Maine. He has two manuscripts, Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle and Lord Sugar, under consideration at various presses.

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