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Fear streamlined to elegance and elegance made mute within this skin of gunmetal and gash mouthed grin. Repute would have the monster cruel—untrue— for mannerly cruelty demands a heart, unwitnessed in its calm machinery.
Published in Margie. Copyright © 2009 by Hailey Leithauser. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
Wan oxymoron of a fish, dotted
dun and fledge winged, mud-feathered when
it glides through silt, by nature bottom fed.
Whoever named it named himself a man
of undisputed Christian eye,
who saw in mortal depths a guardian
and humblest trumpeter. God tongue to cry,
it haunts an earth too dread for dread-
filled man til rapture calls: Arise and fly.