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2020 Academy of American Poets Prize

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DENIAL LULLABY 

by Elena Asofsky

Strange how soil ploughs itself. How fruits push up; unbury; Bones bursting up in moods my textbooks say cannot be extant. I think the body's fake; perhaps there's no reason to worry; Ignore the signs strung to it that condemn being resistant, Bleach is textbook tackle for cleaning corpse existence; Buckets clap and clatter, drown damnations in peroxide; Scour smooth each cortical, erase signs of resistance; On record, every death in here is filed suicide. Damn applause and damn the water, damn American p-r--i-e; Hands come clawing from the rope, the ash, the soil 'neath the glade; On record ----, hide the dead on either s---ide; I am the anger golem. How quickly I'm unmade. Soil spits such strange fruits out in such an awful hurry. I hear the bodies don't exist. I hear there's no reason to worry.





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