Lucie Brock-Broido


Two Girls Ago

No exquisite instruments.

No dead coming back as wrens in rooms at dawn.

No suicidal hankering; no hankering for suicide.

No one thousand days.

No slim luck for the only President I ever loved.

No lukewarm bath in oatmeal.

No lantern left for Natalie on the way home from school in her Alaskan dark.

No eye.

No Victorian slippers that walked the bogs to moor.

No Donner bones with cuts on them or not.

No horizontal weeping; no weeping vertically.

No flipping back your black tails at the black piano bench.

No Elgar, no Tallis, no post-industrial despair.

No French kissing in the field of wild raspberry and thorn.

No commissioned urn.

No threat. In the table of contents I'm not dead yet.
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