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On Laudanum
by Anna Leahy

July 1, 2015 Contributed By: Anna Leahy

Tincture of opium: a suffusing
saturating permeating flood.

Over the counter
from the grocer, the barber, the baker.
A painkiller, a cordial
for irritable babies and bedwetting toddlers,
to alleviate cough, gout, menopause,
rheumatism, ulcers, cramps, bruises.
Nothing anyone suffered
could not be cured.

Hard to know whether sadness
is cause or effect, whether jealousy
is warranted or wanted, whether fatigue
comes or goes as a result,
whether weight is a figment,
whether subject matter, weightless.

I am drawn, so drawn.
I still hear that pun
as it weathers: the lasting for permanence,
the draining away under strain.

How much is enough?
A hundred drops in an evening will lead me
to the difference between
intransitive and transitive,
between drop: slump, decline, fall, plunge

and drop: let go of, release.

          Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862) was an artist’s model, a painter, and a poet
associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and married to Dante Gabriel Rossetti
.

 

 

Return to table of contents for Issue 9 Summer 2015.

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Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: July 1, 2015

Further Reading

ZENO’S PARADOX a previously unpublished entry from A Whaler’s Dictionary by Dan Beachy-Quick

An arrow, and so a harpoon, is stopped while it is moving. Sprung from bow, or hurled from hand, the weapon speeding through the air is frozen “in the Now.” Aristotle solves the problem pragmatically. Time, like space, is infinite in two ways: infinite in extremity and infinite in division. Though nothing finite can approach […]

DAISY FRIED’S RESPONSE TO “SOME DARKER BOUQUETS”

Possible and Impossible Truths About Reviewing Snottiness, contempt, unfairness, mockery, drollery, cruel wit: These are signs of vigor. So is generosity. Vigor in art creates vigor in criticism, not the other way around. Of course there should be negative reviewing. Anonymous reviews may be entertaining, but seem unlikely to be useful. We may enjoy seeing […]

ALEXANDRIA by Theodore Worozbyt

Your request for a renewal has been denied. All analecta must be returned to the Gorgon. Please walk on either lip of the systolic topos. So the signs read, as I took floor numbers from the occupants and pressed square lights the artificial color of forgetting. A caretaker or building engineer wheezed in a mushroom buff […]

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