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Lisa Samuels

Two poems

I’m not waiting for anything

I will go unto my fatherless proclivities
and tickle them under their echoes
                                                                         I will finish

   the raimented air              languishing
                                                                      encrusted

Such turpitude is exquisite, a myriad of vanishing lips
pushing back your mouth, your teeth, your tongue

   she can
                               well imagine it

       the fumbling on your hands is
    mock gesture

                                      range pieces, where it never
                       never was, believing scattered

  where it gathers
    the story is an infinitely small one, although

                                                                   it tells feelingly
barbed wire bristling in the echo




Riddle of the covering cherub

Grim as an obtuse parameter, I have no limbs
a dubious secondary wakefulness, my eye open
made to work in fetching avocation
rolling awkward toward you or picked up
as though a watchful pose could find me dangling
the foster-driven mandates of this dream, long-hoped-for

subcutaneous miracles, what earth
to your availing hands will waken me
to prove an admonition, the orchard of
something natural that artifice becomes

little smiles lest my rueful contents fail
in the air of my suture-self, fond voice
capped in a vortex, not so toggled
gracefully up and down the sky that follows
when I’m let out


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