Burying the Next-Door Neighbor (Anca Vlasopolos)

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like patches off an old quilt beaten for
dust her mind began to unravel

detach float settle unexpectedly
end up being fingered stepped on each day

she would stop my garden travails
air at five-minute intervals the same griefs

stuck record looped tape
memory digging wrongs

then she began to forget how to drink
feed breathe yet not how to love

for her mind’s divorce decree from her body
didn’t betray dog and cats in her care

yet despite that coming apart
or perhaps because the holding together

no longer scattered laser focus of knowing
she prophesied her near ones’ raptor gyres

and they swooped as she told me and told
and they carried her away in the night

now a dumpster sits in the driveway
colossal black bags appear at the curb

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Anca Vlasopolos is the author of The New Bedford Samurai (Twilight Times Books, 2007); Penguins in a Warming World (Ragged Sky Press, 2007); No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement (Columbia University Press, 2000); a poetry e-chapbook, Sidereal and Closer Griefs, print chapbooks Through the Straits, at Large and The Evidence of Spring; and a detective novel, Missing Members (trans. Miembros Ausentes, Madrid, 2009). She has also placed over two hundred poems and short stories in literary magazines.

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Copyright 2009, Anca Vlasopolos

Posted with permission from author.

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Raptors in Motion



aquiline

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