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Migrations Wrested

by Bill Rasmowicz

Water underground is tireless.
Where snow has melted, geese feed from the softness.

Whose head isn’t wobbly as an ox’s on a stick-figure spine?
Whose skin isn’t a natural quarantine to the natural world?

Cinematically roving, the park was a graveyard without graves.
In which, we craved the mulched scent of Christmas trees,
an air mezzo formal
like the lawyer had allotted a single afternoon, beyond which,
a decision was required.

On the hospital’s sixth floor, machines labored forth
the sound of digital moss. Still, it was impossible to coax the
hermit crab from its shell with another shell.

The vivisected head of the plastic baby doll lay next to
an ice-ladder pondside.
The moon’s umbilicus dangled freely in daylight too bright to see.

How to come to your name as your own?
When the washing machine cracked the bricks holding it up…
And doctor of anything was half of what a dandelion root knew…

True: the rug’s arabesque was no longer emblematic of living.
Aesthetics, too, were scientific laws obeyed & broken.
You created your own weather system entering a room.

Beneath, the bones of the dead seemed simply
bones of the deep dead, the glee of sledder’s sentences
like doors too heavy for hinges.

My words were your words, my growling bowels
your growling bowels.
Either the geese were always there, or they would never leave.

This was our dream, that an afternoon amidst sycamores
and they would take us for their own.

Dust of a Dessicated Horse

Over Conversation

 

 
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Bill Rasmowicz Bill Rasmovicz is the author of The World in Place of Itself (Alice James Books, 2007), which won the New England Poetry Club’s Shelia Margaret Motton Prize. His poems have appeared in Hotel Amerika, Nimrod, Mid-American Review, Third Coast, Gulf Coast, and other publications. Bill has served as a workshop co-leader and literary excursion leader throughout Switzerland, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, Germany, England, and Wales. A graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program and Temple University School of Pharmacy, he lives in Brooklyn, NY.