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Blanched Vegetables
The shiny washed faces of dinner plates,
the white paper serviettes,
the polite conversation between fork and knife
as my husband carves the Sunday roast
and my mother already seated at the table
her violet hands tied into posies. Outside
wind gathers all its wayward children in.
The trees hurry leaves under their aprons
and the laundry line twists into a hernia;
downstairs the dirty laundry already sorted
into light, dark and Purgatory. In the sink
boiled potatoes and carrots drain in the colander.
Steam rises like the terror of growing things
pulled from the ground. The window clouds over.
Cro-Magnon
To acknowledge those you once loved is enough
and all that’s required of you now,
to simply gesture towards the unknowable past,
the so-called facts of a failed life: the house, the furniture,
the cars, the job, the children, to simply wave at them
from a distance as you would to Cro-Magnon man
if you happened upon him wandering the Danubian Valley
up into Romania, his low set ears, his brow
sloped back at an intelligent angle,
that wit you so admired in yourself and still miss,
that flickering shadow now drawing its likeness
on the walls of a bone littered cave as it settles in
for a long, cold ice age. As if rubbing two sticks together
until they spark the imagiantion could save a world
spinning toward the outer limits of known history.
Heidi Garnett
Email: Heidi Garnett
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