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Under the lamplights her eyes are orange.
The whole street smells of rain. She holds
a cowering star to her heart, lilts her tongue

like a flame imagined in the mold
where collarbone crooks neck. Enervation: a copper bust
of self. Dependencies leave her mouth offered

the color of autumn snow. She accepts
the communion. He said they should marry.
A sudden nosebleed like a call out of darkness.

After the desert winds fail, nothing to carry
inside her, cell deaths flare in retaliation.
The finishing of doctors’ coats: a kind of levity.

Walking from earth one evening she will decry
the irradiant conceit, and enter the glade of apology.