[ToC]

 

2 POEMS

Andrea Fitzpatrick

NOTHING ESCAPES THE MASTER'S EYE

when the children lost their teeth the adults threw parties and clapped their hands those people had been not kids for a while the tips of the horn the truss of the hay; these types of battles end badly when those little pearly pearls were replaced by razory white the adults just clucked their tongues and sent the kids out there were other people in the field these people had been not kids for a while and liked to chew, even when they weren’t eating: tobacco, licorice, nails, they didn’t care what civilians feared the violence of their own teeth there were lots of children all the time and people stopped eating because of the war a kid who wasn’t a kid might point at a beastie and quiver; still it was bloody and sometimes it was even bloodier than that


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BY-NUMBER (INSTRUCTIONAL)

Like-words:
1: fire; embers; smoke; sun; ash
2: sucking; flapping; bowing; pressing; crossing
3: pinkish; autumn; quiet; skyless; soft
4: orange; translucent; blue; clear; red
5: fingers; vertebrae; shoulders; gums; flesh
6: maddening; deep; light; underwater; death

Sonnet:
(3) (1) crashes in among the (3)
(2) breath & crooked (5)
the color (3) in (6) (1)
set (4) against swirling (1),
the colors all burning (6) (2)
a (4) swatch of (5), (3)
baby spit, (5), without (5)
further, (5) cracked - (6) brown walnuts -
and a (6) pushes itself along (6), malformed,
fins (2) at a (3) wrong. Without the (1), we are
(6) among the (4). Without the (1), we are (3)-(6).
I can see the lines (2), (4) ribbons, (2) along
in the air, curling: (1) & (4) tinted (1).

 

 

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NOTHING ESCAPES THE MASTER'S EYE: Aesop's "The Hart in the Ox-Stall." BY-NUMBER (INSTRUCTIONAL): the (im)possibility of the missing line; camouflage.