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E P H E B I P H O B I A While we sleep, go about our business, leave our doors unlocked, children are prowling the landscape with knives. Now it makes sense to hate the young. To fear them as we fear the green hearth of an open grave. Under our ribs we grew them, spark and bright spoke. We lived to love— in mostly custodial ways— the scald of their first beauty: the underlife, the milk stem, the tingling, sucking babies who needed and needed us. We licked the red caul of their birth hoods back, then kissed their yeasty heads (though their teeth soon looked a trifle sharp). Oh, we could eat them up! But the girl with the summer body, summer skin, turning cartwheels on the lawn at fifteen wants to murder us, it turns out.  Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:43 PM Page 19 She’d do it with her own hands and enjoy it. She won’t have to. The young are God’s gun. Our DNA, remastered in a cool gel matrix wearing a little slip of a sundress, who coos to the skateboarder flipping us the finger. At forty, we meet ourselves coming and going. It forms no small part of the plan that as we thicken toward middle age, dragging our great upholstered bellies to the goblin market of our lumbering importance, the young grow swift as vitamins, the lilt of malice in each step. Lean as gall, wolfish, whistling, they stand on the front porch calling: Grandmother, Grandfather, let me in. I’ve brought dessert! While we pile chairs against the door and miss our nap and fiddle with the thermostat.  Barresi pages:Layout 1 5/12/10 1:43 PM Page 20 ...

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