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Just Ten Minutes Left
by Peter Burzynski

July 1, 2015 Contributed By: Peter Burzyński

Your low errand. Remember all the bras you’ve seen?
How about that one with the lace? Eat your food
and forget your gods. The cat lays next to you as a troublesome ox.
It is less of a vigil, with that rouge of him lying next to you,
innocently licking scabs. Ill things were said of you
when you spewed excrement
on the desk that closed on your pants. It was made again with paint.
True, dear, everyone knew that your family was a battered pack
of lesser eagles quailing your name. The cat is dancing, tilting, nipping
at your ear. Let the view run away, so you can leave safe.
Your shoes are slipping off the ottoman, remember that bra, hands, cholera?

At your birth, father parked askew, panting about any diaper fumes.
You, a baby, had to tend this clueless cretin’s passion; an eager mess
of all hues. He would head back secure, all of it out of head. Brace it,
instead aim at toilets. You told lies about your debris. Father not mad?

Portraits! To all of my faces appearing here, dance! Go loose
on a lunar press. Later, I will stop later.
This basket case rants. A solvent beer should help you now.
It was just harmless a futile lard deli feta sandwich.
Heartburn, attack, death? It just happens.
Enchanted, your irises grow sore of being seen.

Eyes that cannot stand mess are your atlas now. They are a grave staircase
of hums. You live in a fervent era of gems. Levied time thin during a coma.
The universal axe dives at you? Eden was seen last in God’s
plain death, it was a poet’s adjective. Less has mattered?
Hand attendants came to bag the empty old man.

Return to table of contents for Issue 9 Summer 2015.

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Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: July 1, 2015

Further Reading

The Past by Henryk Cierniak
(Translated from Polish by John Guzlowski)

The house was nothing just a building site, thirteen years ago Remember it? It’s still nothing my son is sixteen How can I forget? He’s nothing but an ordinary boy actually a bit troublesome instead of putting up insulation he and his friends go to the village he walks like he’s some kind of god […]

Within by
Rush Rankin

To hold magical dominion over another person’s body one need only attain possession of his pared nails or cut-off hair, his spittle or his excrement; even his shadow, his reflection, or his footprints serve the same purpose. —Ernst Cassirer     i   In epistemology a specific can be tested because various other specifics constitute […]

Untitled #2 by Aleksey Porvin (translated by Peter Golub)

A childhood memory of a summer day engraves the cough drop with untired saliva, and brings out a phrase, sweetly puckering the mouth— if it sounds, hear not a question, but an encompassing intrigue: what is this lachrymose animal who lives under the creak of the swing? Who—without fear—taught this creature, which uses silence to rub […]

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