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Imaginary Death Certificates in Chain-Link Fenced Back Yards For the corner shrines & the Schuylkill fisherman lures lured that girl who looked like Susan at the Arcade asking for just enough to buy a cheesesteak hoagie ~
Rain on the Liberty Bell pierced punk boys smoking menthols outside Zipperhead she scored a bag an elegy in a chain-link fenced back yard she was glass light morphine’s lost fugue her mouth rouged & rough as a refinery forgive me the Susquehanna & Scranton Susan at the bus station on her way to Camden to visit Walt Whitman’s grave decades you tried to believe she was not ~
sold to a pimp in West Philly she was pale as peonies she in her cutoff jeans green halter top she with her spiral notebooks her knapsack of pens her gear ~
She was white as aspirin she nodded the way a lamb bends its neck to drink water she was sipping glass light at the all-night laundromat sipping some ghost language the color of chrysanthemums some witness somebody to blame she was never hungry as her eyelids fluttered blue butterflies her only pallbearers some name pawn shopped in plain sight Walt Whitman ~
how many have disappeared in your beard? Here: a poetry journal
