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AN
UNBLOWN HEART
I am trapped in my apartment
by the New York Summer Heat
which only New Yorkers can truly understand.
Like an old lady who can't walk anymore
I can't go outside.
I smell from yesterday
and need to bathe.
I will turn the head to the foot of my bed so I can lie with the air
conditioning on and not have it howling in my ear like a distressed
hound
it's foot permanently stepped upon.
On the radio
today,
just by the by,
I happened to hear that
authorities
have reason to believe that some one may be planning a poison gas
attack on
our subway system.
Another thing that only New Yorkers can really understand; in
America
anyways, as much as you can really understand the idea that someone
wants to
gas you without knowing you.
I am afraid to go out.
I am hot and afraid to go out.
I am sitting on the sofa
but really I am crying.
I can't read the paper anymore.
I haven't been able to for a while.
I suppose this is how it starts,
this isolationism
and fear,
and if I were alone long enough
I myself
might build a bomb.
But not gas.
That's just too cruel;
as jew I object
to deaths you can't see.
Bill said he had been hunting for squirrels.
In the Appalachians for months and
craving for meat
he had caught these animals.
Hunting to eat is OK
he says
if you are not a vegetarian.
I have been practicing with targets.
Over and over.
Building accuracy.
If I can take one deer in the fall
and one turkey,
I will have red and
white meat for a year.
I will bless these animals
which will mean
nothing
to them.
Poor bright them.
I'm sorry.
But I am not ready for hunting yet.
I know that.
I am not quite accurate enough.
You don't want to miss the kill spot and injure the animal, have
them bleed
out slowly and fall in pain, cowering in a pile on the flat of grass
passing
slowly into it's smell and green an unblown heart full of agony and
wondering.
Liza started
writing songs and performing them as a teenager, and is a former
production editor at Pantheon Books (Random House). Have featured
with poetry at Bowery Poetry Club, Knitting Factory, Spoken Word
Cafe, Theater for the New City (LES arts fest.), Poets West in
Seattle, and Queen Ann Arts Festival (also Seattle). Will be part of
the upcoming book, Poems from the Heron Clan III (Katherine James
Books, Chapel Hill), and have also been pubbed on Roguescholars.com,
in World War Three, and Rising Nepal. Various non-fic publications
as well in fields of psychotherapy and gemology.
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