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August 21, 2018 Poetry

Omission

M. Drew Williams

Omission photo

Really, I can curse the river
all I want, damn 
how it ribbons with ease 
over the dark rock bed.
Like the river, my heart is 

a hybrid of unknowable things. 
You don’t know my mother, 
yet know her illness 
in me. Sometimes, I make her mistake 

of seeing hell in the calmest faces. 
Follow me here. Death, for a time, 
quits the neighborhood, though 
its comedy still exists 
in irreverent epitaphs. By now, 

someone should tell the river 
to shut up. But we’ll let it 
say its peace: everything
we can omit later.
 

image: Aaron Burch


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