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    THREE RED CANVASES OF MINE

                 On a shelf
    on a nail
                 on top of the door frame
    your stares make a triangle
    of forward-thrusting gaze.
    I dagger down their lines
    & slowly, carefully, leg
    outside. I check myself: Alive.

    So it feels right to palm you down
    & line your painted faces up
    like a masculine chorus—dancers,
    silent: right legs in front,
    fingers reached out,
    chests rigid
    & smiles sword-long.



    LETTER IN PEELS

    bananas—you are my constant
    mourning—you yellow it—interrupt
    with that slow         of skin parting
    away—freshly, greenly
    like bark—resistant

    as these thighs—reminders,        sticky—

                    you’ve got no
                    control in this
                    world, girl

    just two knees spoiling
    in a tight room—the world full of air
    closing in         on hips, kneading
    hard—nothing to do but bruise



    THE REAL SELF

    These days short shorts are really working on it.
    A kind of public danger, loud-hipped, an inner
    thigh pressing other thighs just to part them.
    During sex it thinks of hamburgers, a bathtub full.
    Often pacing the food court alone it comes
    to the movieplex & buys a ticket for one about dolphins.

    Compatible hips sit paired & close in the theater
    because they hinge only for each other.
    But the self is free to straddle rows.

    When its deep laugh booms out during funny
    bits, other legs twitch toward their partners.
    A calm voice onscreen says dolphins kill for mates
    or in defense or without reason, but the self
    has crawled under a seat to look for change.

     

    Virginia McLure edits the online poetry project www.lafovea.org and has worked with A Public Space, LSU Press, and Washington Square Review. A former Goldwater Fellow in Poetry within New York University’s MFA program, where she completed her thesis under Charles Simic, she has recent writing featured or forthcoming in BOMB, Nashville Review, and Meridian.

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