Arsenic Lobster poetry journal
Issue Eighteen
Winter 2008
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Fidelity
Ted Lardner

           1.
It is an upside-down sailboat righting itself. In the discourse on public space it is a page of asters.
It is walking a broom of moths past a furnace, an interior silence plump with awareness, like
Bessie Smith. Remote and familiar, it is Renoir putting on boots, it is birds touching beaks, it is
the walk on the beach, never the same beach.

           2.
Once in Laramie we roasted a chicken. The house was ours that day, though the dog we brought
with us loped outside and howled at the sky. The sky was the inside of an oven. In retrospect,
the oven was too hot. We pitched the smoking bird through a door, then stood outside. The dog
was in heaven. In the palace of its senses, smoke poured forth from opened windows, dogs and
dogs were coming every direction.

           3.
The flora covering your skin is the flora covering mine.

           4.
Columbus discovers the curvature, across the horizon, how continents bend toward each other.
Plush on the couch, two bodies. They set out, they expect to be discovered. Breathing feels
violet. Seeds along its known edges are forms of empathy, coconut shells swept ashore, filled
with baby's teeth, pearls of hatred and longing.
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