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28 October 2013

a poem


roaches

I love cockroaches
the way they breathe
through their skin

if you submerge them
in water they hang limp—
a simulation of death

but once they dry out
their antennae twitch
& they sprint into the dark.

I am saturated— 
all my orifices shut 
laying in stasis

entombed like sewage 
I wait for the sun
to dry my flesh

05 October 2013

excerpt from my annotation on mary ruefle.



"The world is wide & black stretching out before you… like falling asleep in a far-away field & waking up at midnight to see nothing but statuesque darkness in every direction. The time I was swept off the rocks at the beach by what my mother called a “sneaker wave” & almost drown in less than three feet of water because my brain couldn’t register which direction was up. 

I keep thinking of it as ash. The moments after the volcanic eruption in which all the noise has stopped, & the ash wafts down like blurry snow. I’ve never been in a volcanic eruption, but I’ve seen pictures: my mother standing in her prom dress on the front lawnthe sky grey above her."


-nr