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Entry: open word

By Anne Marie Rooney
Poetry•Vol. XXV No. 2 (Summer 2012)

Breaks of water collapse the poisonous tongue. In the grass
around the corner are small faces making light of the pain,
its precedents, endingness. I have a swelling but the way I feel
is plain, a heat slat falling. Bright pocks appear and you know
that means life squeezed too tight. There is energy to diminish
the bog, and energy to take a bland angle, pucker little fat pockets
into clean, new fur. I hug the father though he lies in his cold
room, limited, a pill no longer contained. By noon there is no
rain for the feel, I have a bag of still books in this race, oh everyone
cry for me. Photographs of beautiful women hold flat winter
faces against the world’s face. But seeing the other as always
so base deepens nothing, steel tie rusting on the table like a white
rock being beaten. Day waves sting it, singe skin up in it. Wife
of no sway, brand the sign of having-been-here to the side of me,
the thicker thigh crooked forward in grace, or wealth, and wait.
There is no place in the furl for a crown dying stealthily. You want
the slow collapse, the sour drip made gold by each stick of dumb
rhyme. Slick of dumb color, there is time.

Anne Marie Rooney is the author of Spitshine (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012). She has won the Iowa Review Award, the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, the Amy Award, and others, and been featured in the Best New Poets and Best American Poetry anthologies. Born and raised in New York City, she currently lives in New Orleans, where she is a teaching artist.

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