photo by Gabriel Parker
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George Says Stop Writing About Yourself
(New York, December 2001)
This one’s for George, who urged take off those
shit-kicker boots, leave your husband wrapped
in the scroll of last night’s sheets, forget your mother
sipping a cigarette, a Dugan’s Dew—forget
your other mother, your other father, too,
and the one you last saw in a coffin not looking
at all like himself, so much not-him you couldn’t
bear be near that body. Forget your first kiss—
how it sounded like peanut butter, tasted like
a train. Stop talking about the Alabama Slammers
and four Blue Whales or those men you drove crazy
with your push-him, pull-him love. And don’t speak
of babies, about not having them or the ugly one
who’s so much a part of your nights she must be
real, her mongrel face breaking into sadness.
Don’t talk about holding her above your head,
calling her Sweet Girl, Mama’s Girl—how she almost
smiles. Just for George, this poem looks beyond
Sea Monkeys and that first Louisville Slugger.
It opens the window to the stench, three months
now of that smell, man-made, human, wafting
from downtown. This poem is in the street,
where war does its thing. See, there’s a man
walking up Broadway: his shoes, suit, eyelashes,
lips covered with dust that used to be a building.
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In June 2021, The Word Works Press will publish Meg Kearney’s All Morning the Crows, winner of the 2020 Washington Prize for poetry. Meg is also author of An Unkindness of Ravens and Home By Now, winner of the PEN New England L.L. Winship Award; a heroic crown, The Ice Storm, published as chapbook in 2020; and three verse novels for teens. Her award-winning picture book, Trouper, is illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Meg’s poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac” and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” series, and included in the 2017 Best American Poetry anthology (Natasha Tretheway, guest editor). She lives in New Hampshire and directs the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program in Massachusetts.
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