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Marianne Boruch

Let’s rummage through each other’s bodies like a blowout sale.

I want you enough to gnash you into a silence made from pieces of silver.

I am veins and breath, the entrance the world passes through.

There’s nowhere he can kiss where she hasn’t been kissed by the sun.

How large our muscles have to be to lift our wings even a single time.

Imagine octopus, and keep the talk going through the chew.

I’ve taken the pledge and made donations of blood to the world.

A child no bigger than small change calls from her window j’ai faim.

What do you offer someone who has lost half of her beginning?

At Walden Pond, Henry Thoreau clicks like on the “Wilderness” page.

Let’s put a frog in his bed and have him feel it jump all over him.

Like lions in cages, women like me dream . . . of freedom . . .

With these fingers, afraid and aware, I stroke your delicate skin.

I bled. God didn’t want to hear about it. He said unclean and so it was.

The meeting hall of their bodies piled on lawns caked with dying birds.

The keys look like Tommy’s teeth once he began to appreciate meth.

i learned to save lives from a man who reminded me of my father

“You’re going somewhere now,” he said. “Up to the big smoke.”

We cannot leave it to the forces to rub out the color of the world.

Don’t try to find me by spit, by genetic sleuthing, by Are you my?

A ripple across the darker fathom, no sooner there than torn away.

He told me that he knows a parent’s grief for a dead child.

I want you, you captive, delivered into each other’s territories.

What consequence is a body/a body nonetheless. If the light in me is gone.

Your hand on my nightgown, my soft places. I wish you wouldn’t do that.

God is there between things, sitting at his own left hand.

Our cocoa is gone and our dreams are being eaten by mice.

There’s no need to check for a pulse, hold a hand mirror for breath.