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In Ambient Light My love is so small. My love is a bird fluttering near a cut orange. Or my love is a moth, coming again to light. My heart is a one-room cottage. Have you ever lived in a one-room cottage? I paid rent by the week and the stove was a step from my bed. I was grateful to be held by its walls. Now I live near a cheap motel. It’s where people have affairs. Where they blow smoke at the empty pool and wait out the divorce. At night I see them come and go under the sodium vapor lamp. Sometimes I catch an angry phrase or a familiar song drifts from someone’s tinny radio. The light casts shadows across my yard. We call this ambient light. It’s hard to find stars through its artificial glare, to see what else is there. The firefly, for instance, crossing the black ribbon of road. I find him when he descends–– haloed in the grass. With a tiny heart, 51 who wouldn’t fly from the darkness? I cup him in my hands and lift him back into the air. 52 ...

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