Poetry | September 01, 2010

Featuring the poems:

  • When I Was the Virgin of Westchester
  • When I Was The Donna Reed Show
  • When I Was Infertile
  • Metastasis (featured as Poem of the Week, Nov. 11, 2010)
  • Helplessly Hetero

 

Metastasis

(Gilbert’s Bar House of Refuge, Hutchinson Island)

When the glaciers armied through Florida, like anywhere else, they left a mess of rocks and sand and animal bones behind them. They did this peacefully over a long period of time, and the animals felt peaceful as they died in the crush of ancient cold, and present-day sea creatures poking through deserted coral remember nothing of those faraway deaths. Yet when the moon presses down on the Atlantic like the whole hard body of God, even the smallest worm on the reef will admit to hearing a moan in the ocean’s bed. And if you’re standing on shore past your bedtime, Northern creature warmer than you’ve ever been in winter, and the moonlight pins you like a moth to the side of the old sea-eaten hand-built bench, you can hear it too — you don’t want to, you shake your head against it, but it’s real and mixed up with every other sound that’s ever occurred up and down this killer beach.

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