by Maureen N. McLane
illustrator Florence Manlik
Issue II
The privilege
of even being
provincial,
to know the small
humiliating city,
the ever unfinished
cathedral,
that over there
is the real where:
we had none of it.
No one heard
of anything.
The glit and shine
and scut of it shimmered
on TV the satin crotch
of the metropolis
a 13” square
of already thinned
fantasy.
No wonder
the saints
were martyring themselves
repeatedly, furiously
in imagination.
This was something
to die for
a life outlined
in acid-bit etchings
obsolete as the names
of trees we were never given
to know in the neighborhood.
