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The Love of This World MAG
All the good in me unlaced I pull what I own across the floor,
books devoured to the spine, impressions the knees of my jeans
have made of kneeling, my ghosts of ghosts, the saint who is namesake.
I lay it out. A turtle can lay one hundred
thirty-seven eggs in the hollows of trash-filled beaches
and pray her young into the foam
and I know how she judges her almost-gone
with the shell’s first clean fracture, and how much she holds
when she owns nothing and watches it race away.
I line it up for you, lay it down, armfuls, fistfuls,
incalculable catalogues of rinsed fingerprints
released, as they are back-breaking, as this convex shell
is enough, as the body becomes the loudest resonating
home where I deadlock roomfuls of possessions,
where my valuables belong so unbearably to me
that they are not mine. And because I want to float
I lay them down, the swatches of fabric, the memories of places
I swore I had owned so wholly I felt them through to the relics,
laid down, the hopes I hold for the ones I’d kill to own
who swim between combs of aimless currents,
of whom I am no owner, of what I am no mother
I lay them out for you. And as the sea holds
each embryo to the memory of one
original shell, I am unforgivably enamored
with the ownership of all.
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This article has 117 comments.
it was AMAZING:)
it is so vreative.
how long did it take for you to write this?
How selfless of you to offer all that you own, only that she could own what is rightfully hers.
The begining was a little hard for me to take off on, but it picks up and becomes so powerful.
Beautiful work.
lol
Keep it up
Every word artfully shaped and strung together at the end.