Ashley Inguanta and Sheila Squillante build bridges between past, present, and future in this jointly-written poem–a first for the Good Men Project!
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Currents
My great grandmother died while looking at the world through a window.
The curtains, though she couldn’t have known this, considered her back.
And my grandfather, he fled from something great;
cabbage palms, red ants, panic and her still hands, open as lace
and hard as my muscle, The Future,
an actual place to visit or avoid, strewn with
a pole dancer beauty, my mouth, the house that is now nothing but a dream.
Razed and raised, shuttered and shuttering. Each landscape, filigreed like
my lover’s voice, distant, and I hope
as bright and bracing as her last glance, his last exhortation:
Why? Window. Why? Hands. Why? Panic and filigree and fire ants swarming
and a woman loved only so much as the world now turned without her.
***
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