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2022 Billy Maich Award

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Basset-Sagged Beast

by Agnes Hanying Ong

 

If / I were / asked whose water is it, always breaking out a prison hemlock of washer unsaddled / all / I know is to keep knotting, knotting grain to cockle / wheat or bone the knickknack / paddywhack right in a species both bod n’ blood that sumac poison ivy family of Mangifera “Just Unmoored” parasocialize at tea / tag tinkling like twin / mosquitoes-raw / fontanelle grand- mother gardens cherry orchard / newly wet with the joy / of picking: up a blade turbine / rotor or rotary like ladylike stain like Lourdes every single, or seeking skein / of silken grass still beads nimbi O even every squirm is sacred too, says the magi in the magic black box / So teach a bone how to dock lastingly at last. Harder now / less soft for a dog to last just unmoored since I have followed the night with the wind, the wind has come back for mon amour we shake it / shag it, shake it all off, like disco balls in stipple cinema-loud making an ancestry to trout-spit that swims, through many a letdown, lock. Lady / of soirées pets rust belt of chastity what / letdown tits, what letdown cuppa, tulips, closing, around whatever it is / that is bulbus glandis. Who knows how? Grandmother, a rough duck cloth in / theory descended sugar-and-pepper rough to turret typewriter o' all things wrung / with zoom looming a fallen sun / Once upon a wall although ze pulls a rope, up with rage against toothy rage o’ God quite irate / Hir opened leap of faith, like the pagan spills / theirs over roger roach rage that supposedly kairos hole in hir belly like another world’s subzero wind whispering: Adderall, Adderall, O Adderall! Into every wed and dirty ear of acedia at noon, as always for insertion of tick / its hairy chin as a long but leased reincarnated kind cactus desiring only to give / free hugs to the acid rain here, to the lark, clerk of a sour there / to the other stati virginally, vacated. Into the closet my sinewy water fills the scheme of kindness and into the glory, blue / flares porous / goddess o' Pele. All they

 

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