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POETRY - ISSUE FIVE

Outliving

CAMILLE RANKINE

* * *



It’s heady here under the table,
too dusty to ring the dinner bell, too heavy 
to open the window and let birds

breeze in, wide and ready. Let’s drink 
to transients. Let’s 
keep the guests believing

in ghosts and we’ll keep 
busy waltzing, wanting
to be sliced into.

Is there anyone here
bedding the master, anyone hungry
as the night must be, lonely as Tuesday?

I’ve been dirigible, 
changing hands, forgetting the milk.
Void and taut as a canvas ever since.








Symptoms of Aftermath

* * *

Tonight, I dream the dead and how they want
me.  They scale the walls.  They tear a skylight 
to the sky.  I, requiring life, start a fire 
and burn them all up.  Lady Luck arrives late, we drive our bodies
to the dump. Afraid in the dark, I shake her 
by the shoulders.  Where will the survivors congregate?  
How will we have our eggs?  We ration out our breath 
in the bomb shelter.  Luck doesn’t make it. There was nothing 
anyone could have done.  When I am saved, a slim nurse 
leans out of the white light.   I need 
to hear your voice, sweetheart.  I see 
my escape.  I walk into the water. 
The sky is blue like the ocean, 
which is blue like the sky.









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Camille Rankine’s first book of poetry, Incorrect Merciful Impulses, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. She is the author of the chapbook Slow Dance with Trip Wire, selected by  Cornelius Eady for the Poetry Society of America's 2010 New York Chapbook Fellowship, and the recipient of a 2010 "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize. She works as Assistant Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville College and lives in New York City.




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