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Timbre

Mixed media by Erin Curier
In our house there are books on books on every table and bedside stand. Books about the Roman Republic, silhouette of a bronze wolf. Tablets of poems crafted in long pipes like periscopes that you tell me you don't follow. A copy of your own novel holds a permanent corner of the round table - city of Buffalo in the rain. Blue stick figure notes dissect a yellow pad placeholder. An entire lecture series beacons we sit up and take notice. Anxious underfed populations balance on the head of a pin, hitchhikers.

I eat fettucini with green clams while reading midday, flip through saucy paragraphs, thumbing paper like garlic skin that sticks to skin. Lemon pepper punctuation. Monsters and friends spill from the orange cover and spine as I press down cautiously for fear of leaving clues on fresh snow and in the gutter of glue. Dedication like a large horse of a dog in woodblock poised in the foreground of a black forest.

Secondhand Baldwin catches fire again, and illogical cummings un-punctuates hearts cupping hearts. We are insatiable. An invisible woman written as a man writing as a wife. I savor the author's epigraph again, and the final page. I place the book back on the table. Trembling. Timbre. A play about an atheist. Great expectations. 

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