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Collected Poetry

    (rd king dot net)
poetry and digital art

Salmon Cannas  

Prose poems.


  Coextensive Lines


It's Tuesday morning. You're putting stock away between cups of coffee and casually avoiding the boss. Everything looks routine and unspecific; everything looks thoroughly stunned yet ardently florescent. But then something drifts slowly toward the back of your head:   you notice that you've missed a very strong beginning in a girl found browsing in the bookstore. She is a plain girl full of haphazards, starts, that in a curious way afford you no conjurements for her acne, her source, or a sex for her organs. So once again you must stop and review your life as a random series of coextensive lines broken only by bed slats, bank queues, table knives—which you could accept as a small achievement.

But she speaks to you:   a short query for a Rostand play and you bite back the image until the pen bleeds down your chin. It is an autumn Saturday at dusk. The scene presents itself as if it expects your participation. You are walking down a street on the lower eastside when you brush shoulders with another man. Intrigued, you stop—hoping to question him about his ancestry. But he continues on, offering spirited quips to some rather indecent-looking women who are leaning against a storefront.



     
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