Mild Nights (Anca Vlasopolos)

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It’s a mild night we stand in--all friends
recapping the gathering, thrusts and parries,
touché and worse, wounds

a shape cuts itself out of darkness
to cross the barely lit street
a cat with a kitten held by the nape
only this is no maternal hold
this no offspring of hers
this one knows and screams and screams
and screams
till the street falls silent as we
now that death has fed

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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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