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Leah Falk: Islands

October 24, 2016 by PBQ

Brooklyn, July 2014
 
We cycle toward the Verrazano Narrows through a strand of sabbath islands. 
 
Teenage girls in black skirts go visiting like their mothers. 
 
Fridays, sirens sing at dusk, reminding us to divide our bodies from the calendar. 
 
Yesterday we woke to video of a man gasping his last rites. 
 
Machado at a friend’s grave wrote y tu, sin sombra ya: how soon you are without  
shadow.  
 
Where the river dams, glass bottles gather. 
 
Somebody mutters: blessed is the fire-maker, holds a bouquet of wicks above his  
daughter. 
 
Frame of twilights where we built our little cottages: we can’t live there still. 
 
The sun a stern guard before the door to dusk.  
 
A girl pedals toward the rail between her and the ocean, tumbles as if out of orbit.  
 
Somebody says, happy is the one who can divide the light from darkness.  
 
Whitecaps turn their backs on one another in the bay. 

Filed Under: Contributors 94, Issue 94, Poetry, Poetry 94, Uncategorized Tagged With: Contributors 94, Leah Falk, Poetry, Poetry 94

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