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North American Kittens

​​Don’t tell me I don’t know
this place. These remarkable
hills and more remarkable
shopping carts. This afternoon
distending directly into the
upstairs closet where you sleep
on duffel bags with pills
in every pocket of your denim
jacket. I offer you a cucumber.
You sacrifice our friendship
for a stricter politics of
sabotage. Indifference is
a privilege. But it’s difficult
to commit to loving every
living thing when you don’t
know when death begins.
When I say America, you see
airbrushed beaches and
sealed packages of syringes.
I see a vacant lot swarming
with bodies on BMX bikes.
I see every liquor store
in Norwalk shining beneath
dilated stars. An anarchist
dentist from Soviet Georgia
once told me North Americans
are kittens. Nothing I write
will get me killed. The universe
continues as an endless
series of births. At some point,
when our molecules recycle,
we will become each other.
We will stop rehearsing
ourselves to bathroom mirrors.
My hands will be a sofa
or a beam of future light.
Your eyes will be a monk’s
tennis racket or an automatic
rifle. Until then, I will go
on jogging with my dad.
Picture
Rebecca Norris Webb. Kitchen Window from My Dakota. © The Artist.

Social Hour

​​Inside the bedroom
there are spiders.
 
God is always on
the phone with them,
 
you said after I told
you that I want to be
 
left alone for at least
a year. When I walk
 
our daughter to school
I want to tell her things
 
that will help her sleep.
At night the walls tell you,
 
No one is brave,
but they don’t talk to me.
 
I watch the spiders
and listen to the stream
 
where the deer mingle
without social anxiety.

Vincent Poturica’s writing appears or is forthcoming in New England Review, DIAGRAM, Western Humanities Review, and Forklift, Ohio. He lives with his wife and daughter in Long Beach, CA, where he teaches at local community colleges.
Originally a poet, Rebecca Norris Webb often interweaves her text and photographs in her books, most notably with her monograph, My Dakota — an elegy for her brother who died unexpectedly — with a solo exhibition of the work at The Cleveland Museum of Art in 2015, and a second edition published this winter. Her photographs have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Le Monde, among other publications. Her sixth book, Slant Rhymes, with her husband and creative partner Alex Webb, will be released next spring. The work was inspired by their joint Instagram.
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  • Home
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