Motherless   

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If I try eyes-shut hard;
recall the misty likeness of a stretcher
and air mask, a trailer lined with
ice-fangs in Napanoch, a red ball
I worshipped at three years old.
How your legacy sits in two boxes.
Poor math, crayoned stick-people,
tidy poems you wrote in the 80’s
             That are all
                                 formatted
                                                  like this.
Pour upon the wording, to have
known you. I scrounge your experiences
to exonerate my own.
The exactness of your malady, father’s
a How-To guide on being in one’s cups.
You get dry in centers and rooms,
found something God-like,
pressed petals between pages,
all piecemealed at my fingertips.
I’m faint praise as a pushing thirty
dry spell. Oh how our quenching throats beg,
didn’t and don’t they?
Pour upon the wording, to
know how. Yet, I’ll remain séance-less.
I’ve found something myself.
                                         How to speak.

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