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Penelope Cray

Real and True

Fiction from NER 36.4

_Ernest_Williamson__III-The_Love_Seeker

My first wife was my fist. I pummeled my wife into life and made way for myself. When she was spent I took my foot as my second wife. 

With her I ran hard and far and achieved great distances from my beginning. I ate fine foods and my mouth watered, so I took my mouth as my third wife and we lived together for years in our bounty. 

But she grew sour and bored, so I took my eyes as my fourth wife because the eyes cannot see the mouth no matter their contortions. 

But the eyes, prone to slumber, were unavailable half the time, so I took my heart as my fifth wife out of need for a steady presence. I felt I could not live without her so large was my true love for my fifth wife. 

[Read more]

Penelope Cray’s poems and short shorts have appeared in such literary magazines as Harvard Review, Pleiades, Bartleby Snopes, elimae, and American Letters & Commentary, and in the anthology Please Do Not Remove (Wind Ridge Books, 2014). She holds an MFA from the New School and lives with her husband and two children in Shelburne, Vermont, where she operates an editorial business from home.

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Sarah Audsley

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Writing this poem was not a commentary on a rivalry between the sister arts—poetry and painting—but more an experiment in the ekphrastic poetic mode.

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