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To preface: I'm not RetroLounge, nor would I ever try to replace RetroLounge. My poem threads are going to go a little differently than his did, in the sense that um, er, I'm going to post them at night, and probably not every night. I can't promise that all of them will be happy, inspiring or conventionally beautiful. In fact, some of them are going to be downright dark. We're going to have some feminism, some avant-garde abstraction, and some obscurity. Maybe a little humor. Hopefully, no one will try to track me down and sue me for copyright infringement. I might even post some of my poems. We'll see. So, without further delay:
"Postcard"
I'm thinking about you. What else can I say? The palm trees on the reverse are a delusion; so is the pink sand. What we have here are the usual fractured coke bottles and the smell of backed-up drains, too sweet, like a mango on the verge of rot, which we have also. The air clear sweat, mosquitoes & their tracks; birds, blue & elusive.
Time comes in waves here, a sickness, one day after the other rolling on; I move up, it's called awake, then down into the uneasy nights but never forward. The roosters crow for hours before dawn, and a prodded child howls & howls on the pocked road to school. In the hold with the baggage there are two prisoners, their heads shaved by bayonets, & ten crates of queasy chicks. Each spring there's a race of cripples, from the store to the church. This is the sort of junk I carry with me; and a clipping about democracy from the local paper.
Outside the window they're building the damn hotel, nail by nail, someone's crumbling dream. A universe that includes you can't be all bad, but does it? At this distance, you're a mirage, a glossy image fixed in the posture of the last time I saw you. Turn you over, there's the place for the address. Wish you were here. Love comes in waves like the ocean, a sickness which goes on & on, a hollow cave in the head, filling & pounding, a kicked ear.
--Margaret Atwood
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