Nobody’s Poem

by Michael Waters

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This piece is part of our Fall 2018 print issue.

Michael Waters

Michael Waters’ books include The Dean of Discipline (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), and Celestial Joyride; Gospel Night; Darling Vulgarity (finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize); and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems from BOA Editions. He has co-edited Reel Verse, Contemporary American Poetr,y and Perfect in Their Art. A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of five Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the NEA, Fulbright Foundation and NJ State Council on the Arts, Waters teaches at Monmouth University and in the Drew University MFA Program.

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Huge and unembarrassed, my friendfloated like a Buddha in the small pool.I drank iced tea, gradedchlorine-splashed paperson The Mayor of Casterbridge. When she had her babyon a bed covered with a shower curtain,I did what I was told, sealedthe placenta in a plastic bag,stashed it in the freezer. Life was breathless in its daringor boring

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But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. —Moby Dick I’m sitting by the pond where

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Maybe he never existed. Maybe this is all he is. Cobbled prop in a worker’s cap and prisoner’s shirt. Face without features. Puppet arm lifting a cup to an absent mouth. Two crossed triangles on a chest where a heart might flutter. Before, and after. Silence speaks where a tongue may not. Strangle it out.

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