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Marianne Boruch is the author of eleven poetry collections, including Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), The Anti-Grief (2019); Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing; Cadaver, Speak; and The Book of Hours, for which she won the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award. She has also published three essay collections about poetry, including The Little Death of Self, as well as a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler. A professor emerita at Purdue University, Boruch continues to teach in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College.

Photograph by Will Dunlap.

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Rings of Saturn

by Marianne Boruch
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Those ladies at the rummage sale
have buried bodies they love. I believe that
though who could guess,
the way they joke and count: out of a twenty
that leaves ten, or would you
care for a five, a few ones, a little change?

Yes, that would be great.
But he stopped breathing midafternoon
almost three years ago, or
she never felt all that well after her fall down the stairs.
Therefore, it ends. It does
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