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2/23/2019 3:43:59 PM

Anita Lerek
Posts: 1

Aging Sequence Number 9
I call for you
when my stomach hurts
I call for you
when I cannot swallow

I call for you from ghosted parts of my body
that are disturbed in the performance
of the smallest acts of mercy

How you blew me around as browning
wind sprinkling your seed, transporting dusty
hells from far off wars over aspen forests
that trembled and rustled in special
attunement to your degraded touch

You knocked my mind’s flesh into blossomed
kill. Your abuse shielded your love
that shielded your abuse under contract
to survive. Your land was not my land,
I grieved our severed skin

We were squalling poplars pushed by winds
not of our making. We smacked against
each other, our needs like burning red leaves
dropping to the ground, forfeited. Yet now I
know something remained at the roots

You inhabit my hands, the brown
spotted skin that moves so loosely
like a wizened rubber nipple

Mother breeze,
cradle the body of my thought.
Obliterate the point. No illusion,
no despair. Simply stop the racing
forward to the point of vanishing when
all I will do is mouth the gibberish tips
of submarine longings, and toddle back
and forth calling for you

(c) Anita Lerek, 2019

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