The Poetry of Karla Huston | ||
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HOW I GOT LIPSTICK ON PAGES 17, 18, AND 19 OF THE BOOK I PLANNED TO GIVE YOU |
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I'd marked the page with a Post-it note—
from the stack I'd used to fix my lipstick, when I chiseled the tube to a precarious edge, the groove narrow and sulking, the color— not quite the shade of fire on the book's cover, but more like maple sugar, the flush of wine on the liner page between the author's name and his poems. Today I see the smear bleeding through the page before and the page after, so that now three pages bear the maddening mark, and wonder what you might think of this waxy stigmata. Now I remember how I wanted to reach you with these words, pull you back to me like loose rope, while you spoke prayers into your hands. I thought we might finally be saved, find calm in the spaces between letters. But now it seems that waiting has no reward, and time is only a sigh of lines, your lips broken and smoking. |
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Previously published in One Trick Pony and the chapbook: Flight Patterns, winner of the 2003 Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest, 2003.
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