Elaine Equi

1953 / Oak Park, Illinois

If I Have Just One Word

Well, still that's a lot
of possibility.

A word can be a shriek
or a chrysanthemum—

barbed
or honeyed—

or maybe one of those
nonchalant, writerly words,

a preposition, pronoun,
conjunction on its way
to the soiree of a paragraph,

something to say
there's plenty more
where that came from.
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