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Dig the Hole Peter Conners It was the winter all the mice were dead. It was the raping of the cheese as brown gravy wails and struggles on the stove: no match for the bellowing of wind through bayonet hollows. It was the way we bow our heads like this, lock step. Wrest the oxygen from your lungs, sweet bitch, and sacrifice it to things that move like sanity. It was the mint jelly universe; a mugged wicked witch spraying candy corns while beaten to death by a novelty flashlight; torn tongue dragging beneath weathered sole. The weeping of the pupils and lifeline ditches filled with shit. Thick coils made of hair: sharp teeth and scabbed knuckles; it was a spider in the corner of the curio cabinet. It was the skin fallen from Grandpa’s calves weathering the winter of our malcontents. Mice scampered over new graves. My cat moldered in his blankets. The C Word Peter Conners The hands of a clock were strangling my neck in the staring mirror. The mirror’s only capability. Mirrors and clocks: one over the vanity the other over the toilet. Days are encircled by terms threatening to be meanings. Nights are choked off by meanings turned meanderings. In short, wash your hands. Once a dire message is insinuated it is forever lodged in your in-box. Entire mornings stuffed with bad messages when one virus leaps out to wipe them away: those were not hands after all, but still necessary for the procedure. Burgundy scarves lap at easterly breezes, salt of migration, the dreams of mirrors and clocks and scarves and necks.... Peter Conners'prose poetry collection Of Whiskey and Winter was published by White Pine Press in 2007. A short prose collection Emily Ate the Wind will be published by Marick Press in April 2008. He is founding co-editor of Double Room, and edited PP/FF: An Anthology (Starcherone Books, 2006). He has work forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Verse, Salt Hill, Fiction International, Sentence, and elsewhere. He lives in Rochester, NY where he works as an Editor at BOA Editions
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