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Russell Jaffe: You and I are Cooled magma Idols They      Call Lava Rock

May 12, 2011 by PBQ

Honey, you rise like an ancient day with a glyph smile.
I sacrifice myself in driving to work,

cutting ashes of the grey November highway

and the morning news cannot replicate that tone.

Honey, I held my fist up and told you I had a mouth of gold,

but behind the loincloth of a day I’m a naked animal.

Getting dressed, I feel like a mossy altar.
You’ll have to stretcher me out of bed with you—

you’ll have to arrow me, concrete slab my

finite calendar and I’m buried over in the magma sweet

honey that holds apartment walls together and heat the objects we forge:

We call them skillets. We call them bones. We call them

worldly, but our world has long since expired,
so we’re really biding time.

Filed Under: Contributors 84, Issue 84, Poetry, Poetry 84 Tagged With: Contributors 84, Poetry, Poetry 84, Russell Jaffe

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