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A Letter Home (Sestina) by Fear of Garbage
The geography of this place is entirely different from Gaza.
It is more like a handgun in the arms of a nurse,
Or a moon the faint color of crimson.
It throws a pale light
Bubbling out of my spine
Like water from the hot Atlantic, sulphorous and cruel.
This is a place of white bone and cruelty.
A slick heat, wetter than Gaza
With matching weapons of metal growing from my nurse.
She treats me like old plaster, cracks my spine
And wades in inches of rotten crimson.
If there is any sort of light,
It is the stony, green light
Of a wet heart. When I was cruel
I kicked you down the stairs 'til you were crimson,
Made you fly right off to Gaza,
Without so much as a shivering spine.
I gave no feline thought to nursing.
A body full of cavities cannot nurse,
Can only get a slithering dark out of light.
I broke three inches of your spine
With a toe the size of a tusk, hooked like a cruel
Bird. They stuffed you in a crate, packed you off to Gaza,
Where you saved your breath until the air was crimson.
Your organs are quite crimson.
They were stuffed by that gaunt, green-skinned nurse
With a kind quivering jelly only available in verdant Gaza.
They are shaking cables of light,
Channels through the spine
That take you, and mouth you, like a mother of cruelty.
They don't know the pith of my cruelty
Or the pulpy mess of crimson
I dropped on your steps. The gray spine
Of a damp book or the watery dress of a nurse.
Your arms look the same on the stairs in the light;
But they are cast in iron, coming madly back from Gaza.
In the light, they are two dead spines.
The crimson water-mark, the cruel
Nurse who cut the cable, running back from Gaza.
Votes: (green: user, blue: anonymous)
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Arithmetic Mean: 4.75
Weighted score: 4.970199
Overall Rank: 8426
Posted: October 31, 2004 4:48 PM PST; Last modified: October 31, 2004 4:48 PM PST
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