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Nightingale Droppings Can Also Brighten Your Kimono

August 21, 2012

From Lucia Perillo’s “To Nightingales” (NER 25.1, 2004):

There is a bird for just about any kind of grief:
loon for the operatic grief, woodpecker for grief that comes like a hammer
and nightingales for the grief that is a fantasy—
face it, nightingales: here in the New World you don’t even exist.

* * *

And yet I hear you calling out from cyberspace,
your song that is constant while we grow old—
Keats said it first, and now a click on your breast
gives anyone ten seconds of your unchanging pennywhistle.

[read more]

Filed Under: NER Classics Tagged With: Lucia Perillo, To Nightingales


Vol. 43, No. 2

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Rosalie Moffett

Writer’s Notebook—Hysterosalpingography

Rosalie Moffett

Many of the poems I’ve been writing lately are trying to figure out how to think about the future, how to reasonably hope, and what we must be resigned to. How can you imagine the future when the present is so slippery, so ready to dissolve?

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