____________________________________________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
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.
Raptors in Motion
aquiline
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