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POETRY | ISSUE SIX
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Two Poems

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By TALIA LAVIN | Fall 2015
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Vintage postcard | Date unkown


​April 5 (Bone Garden)
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It’s April. I want to build up a dozen white columns and break them 
again. The stems of the tulips look like fingerbones to me: spring, a 
violent dream, shudders through all things. I feel like one of those 
waylaid on the road by Siris the bandit, a giant who tied his victims 
between two bent trees and let them go again. Flung on the curved 
shoulders of winds, my limbs, like red standards, will fly into many 
countries; where the drops of my blood fall, a flower with a new name 
will rise and open its gaping mouth. Spring, feeding on blood and dust, 
will continue its lurid chorus: adding day after overgrown day, like a 
handful of seeds that brims, lapping up the wrist, falling, piling, 
trembling. 






April 9 (On Earth as an Arboretum, 


Oh the Convenience)
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Today the wind made a hail of petals all down the street. You watch the 
segmented flowers fall cup-down to the earth. You wish, as always, that 
there were labels on each of the trees, that the whole earth was an 
arboretum. You would also like to see labels on everyone’s foreheads: 
Ben Jones, born 1980, shivers when he passes big dogs and open door- 
ways. Rashid Hamaowi, b. 1975, still remembers her.

You wonder what yours would say. You wonder if, by slimming the kern 

of each line, you could make yourself disappear. Limb by limb, like a 
rain of blossoms, you would drop to the pavement, settle in a whorl, 
drown a little, taken by an impulse of wind into the water.

The days pass like geese driven by a gale. You want to build your life like 

an almanac: ripe wheat, shifting moons, tidy black ledgers of ongoing 
predictions. 







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Talia Lavin is a longtime poet and less-time journalist currently working as a fact checker at the New Yorker. 




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