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Her Chair
My mother must have been tired
of being mother, wife, some patient’s
nurse, tired of a house of dust
and abandoned appliances
drained of their usefulness,
of house keys, doormats,
throbbing of my father’s TV
and ringing telephone, his primitive
remote slipping beneath easy
chair cushions.
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The Idiot Anthem
It was a time of great fanfare, unfair
to many, loud and full of old wind.
We stepped out onto the balcony
as the motorcade went by.
In the crowd we saw a premonition of
our own funerals, each
of us distinctly, individual nightmares.
Those who stayed inside
were dying inside, their words as lax
as exhalations.
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King Opah
King Opah, Moonfish, Lampris Regius, I hope your life,
Before drifting solo up some immense Pacific seamount
In search of squid or other of your own nourishment you
Were hooked by a curious entrepreneurial longline,
Was as good as the dark, dense orange steak
The expert butcher cut from behind your head
Suggested it must have been, that your silver flanks,
That your steely, dark blue dorsal skin or scales
Sporting irregular rows of big white spots
And your orange or crimson fins all navigated
Midnights of fantastic bathypelagic spawning,
That your large eyes circled with gold, vermilion jaw line,
And the thick, rich oily fat beneath your 200-pound iridescence
Quivered with sweet salt as you conducted your pectoral fins
Through oceanodromous wanderings so rarely seen.
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Miss
Much as I’ve
failed, for all
I lack, alone as I
may look without
the phone I left
home, bring me
more wine, nice
man, and please
don’t call
me that.
* * *
Jilt
Juliet, Jillian,
harlot Jill,
in French jillet,
the flirt, unfeeling,
felt, who flung her
don into the dirt,
having fanned
his flame,
the abrupt slut
who ended it.
Share:FacebookTwitterLinkedinTumblrPrintHaving Bummed a Smoke Outside of the National Gallery, Though I Have Quit
“And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess.”
–Eliot
The trees stick out
their tongues
at all of us squatting
at their trunks while wild onions
fall limp at their tips
like month-old mohawks.
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Dear Reader,
This morning the world tried its best to tuck me back in.
I’ve been writing from the demilitarized zone
Of my chest and the weather is almost always clouds.
Who can recall the sun with all this posturing?
I heard a woman say, “We ought to live more real life.”
...the road that reeks of eeriness and seems to go nowhere.
excerpted from All The Sluts Were Virgins Once, a memoir
Mom braided my afro into cornrows every Sunday night.
Anicca, illusion, relativism, dualism, epistemology...
...minute scrapy-whispery sounds...
Share:FacebookTwitterLinkedinTumblrPrintOur essays editor, Derek Alger, passed away in late October. As a tribute we are re-posting all of his contributions to Ducts over the years. We hope you’ll enjoy his passion for writing and, more importantly, his love of people, as much as we have. We will miss him.
For more on Derek, please read The Editor’s Note.
Share:FacebookTwitterLinkedinTumblrPrintFor several years now I have had the pleasure of watching the evolution of Kim Celona’s work as a visual artist. I first started to follow Kim’s work when she was a graduate student and it is fascinating to see how some things about her work have changed, while others have remained the same.
Piecing Communities Back Together: The Creators of The Quilt Story Exchange Explain Their Work. | Art Gallery
Share:FacebookTwitterLinkedinTumblrPrintAshton Page and Claire Fredrick are community artists based in Baltimore, a city known for having more than its fair share of violent crime. With violent crime comes, of course, people who have been traumatized. Both artists have decided to embark on a unique quilting project that will create spaces of peace and healing in the city.