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Return to Earth

from Children of the Anxious City by Al Russell

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lyrics

Ask yourself at dawn
how faces can fade from memory easily
as a human body
deteriorates, eaten
by cells multiplying as they feed.
There are people gone
or dead or fucked off somewhere;
thinking of them too hard
is like looking at the sun,
blurs their faces
so you can’t see
their long noses, the ways their eyes are set, or hear
their pitchy/resounding voices.
They are blank
skin-colored ovals
who may have said worthwhile things.

Ask their memories
which of those things you might have missed,
but you can’t think how they might answer
(crinkling foreheads, whale…
before each pause)

then Roger Daltrey’s face,
coming up through iron-pinned sand,
struggles to keep
metal grains from its open mouth
and a voice talks at you and says,
“This.
This.
This.”

From the ceramics of Koie Ryoji

credits

from Children of the Anxious City, released January 14, 2019

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Al Russell North Carolina

Al Russell is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire. She is a poetry editor at Outlook Springs literary journal. She is also an ordained minister of the Church of the Subgenius. She lives in North Carolina.

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