Blackbirdan online journal of literature and the artsSpring 2012 v11n1
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SUSAN GRIMM

Locked Up Tight

I thought it was progressive as a ladder. But where do you climb to, how sturdy the rails? Let’s scrap that paradigm, especially now with the one bad knee.

Maybe the quarry, great broken bowl. Gouged out, true, but nowhere to fall. In the heat of summer fired up like a kiln.

Trip out on some kind of picnic, junket. You stumble around. Everywhere fossils and beer cans. A scrap of lake. A clatter of sedimentary plates.

There’s a scattering of juniper, random, as if drizzled from the sky. But for a few yards the trees have drawn together—two lines to walk between, beaded with blue.

You don’t need a flashlight to see how we embrace this sign. How we sweep up every scrap for meaning, plunder the earth to explain.  


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