Tim Liardet
Distiller’s Unstable Daughter Explains her
Absence from the Class
The men have come out of the ground again.
I have to tell you the successful distiller
of spirits has a seventh tall daughter.
Listen. They call me from under the street.
They lean on shovels, down under the awning
in the hole in the pavement, exposing the bright wires.
They wear hard-hats, and though not magicians
will restore to me my visibility -
green eye, breast, gangling leg, painted toe-nail.
Yes, they ease me back into view. And I, slipping
in and out of my most perfect of minds -
monster of my yellow psychiatrist - step down
into the sunlight. The sex is clean and necessary.
The orange awning, warmed from the inside, contains
the closest approximation of day.
Now that I can be seen, I am lethal. See -
my vividness. But will my six sisters and mother
and distillery-owning father deep into their storm
have the eyes, the twenty/twenty vision
against the old glaucoma, the eclipsed pupil?
Now there is a question for the red optometrist.
Page(s) 46
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