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Seth Abramson

Forty Six

Lately I see my house
abused by creepers, all
manner of autumn crocus
understating its case: 
we have not lived well.

Lately the children
next door have taken up
kites, all manner of boxes 
and unblinking dragons.
I see their red orbits pass
overhead, round and
round and ever upward.

I want to shoot them
down, every galloping toe
and dark, sinuous limb:
the summer is lined 
with silver, and it is now 
I feel foreign to the sky.
 



Red Rock Twisters (Garber, Oklahoma)

South and west, the fields bow
beneath the whip of ribbons. 
A brief family, I say, perhaps like mine 
and always in motion, five hands 
joined only tip to tip. 

I see their needles stitch the earth 
and draw blood—russet 
crescents in the corn, dark whorls, 
maybe the prints of speech: 
these things are also ours.

They run against the hands 
of the clock, funnel vapors the color 
of garage doors, mailboxes. 
Our chickens kill each other in the barn; 
their screams die with the breeze. 
Galen says a twister can fuse 
the coins in your pocket. 
Grandfather has seen them 
cook potatoes still hunched in soil.

Between gray cracks I watch them 
fall apart and draw to sky, 
their father last and loudly; 
I think he wishes it were otherwise—
that the pain of contact be not so great.

 



Seth Abramson is a 1998 graduate of Dartmouth College and a second-year student at Harvard Law School.  His work has been published or forthcoming in Savoy Magazine, The Southern Ocean Review, Eclectica, The Fish Eye Review, Renaissance Magazine, and The Melic Review
 

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