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BEANS (CURGINA)
Denise Ward
(Lit With Kick)
September came like winter’s
ailing child but
left us
viewing Valparaiso’s pride. Your face was
always saddest when you smiled. You smiled as every
doctored moment lied. You lie with
orphans’ parents, long
reviled.
As close as coppers, yellow beans still
line Mapocho’s banks. It
leads them to the sea;
entwined on rocks and saplings, each
new vine recalls that
dawn in 1973 when
every choking, bastard weed grew wild.
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SOLITUDE
Cherryl E. Garner
(South Carolina Writers’ Workshop)
There is small art in solitude.
It shakes sometimes like random shock,
as though one spot explains the arc
or one fine point defines the line.
There is no talk when none’s received,
when simple converse meets no mark,
as though the circle rolls the ball,
as though the line supports the box.
There is no black like night assigned
to pounding chest and clenched, cold heart,
as though the sphere explains the sky,
as though void space can break the fall,
when locking shut in one timeframe,
some voodoo shimmies out one name.
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BEACH
Millard R. Howington
(South Carolina Writers’ Workshop)
I liked to jog to
the pier my one day off and have
breakfast, gazing at an ocean
through salt stained windows.
There was a bar nearby, mainly
deserted in the off season and
I’d stop in, enjoy a brewski, flirt
a little with the waitress there;
she loved to draw my attention
to the rare big busted patron and
ask me if I knew how they got
that way. On the slow walk back
to my summer rate motel, I skirted
water’s edge and wondered just
how long that little sandpiper
with the one leg was going to last.
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