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not really going, just showing out. Poor old bad old Becky. "But I am too going all you people out there!" "Come on down here and get you some chicken, Becky. Here, Juanita, take her some up." "And I wouldn't care to eat any!" "I have it all fixed back with Miz Mosey, youngen." "And I wouldn't care to have it fixed back!" "Come on down and be sweet now, Becky." I can hear her footsteps on the stairs Poetry nests in the trees whose absence grows on you lies in the fruit of a dream you peel the skin from shines in the sentence parsed by sunlight draws up the rainbow trout caught in the net of your rhythms disappears in the still water of speech where images bob like apples stares up at you from the eye of a period trapped in the cul-de-sac of the present where lead vanishes from the pencil cradled in the halfway house of the hand that leads to the wrist that rises to the elbow that climbs crossing the shoulder's white alps down into the valley of bone where the heart and lungs housing all those hollow rooms resound with the indrawn breath the pump that pushes out blood -Llewellyn McKernan coming with the chicken. If I'm leaving out of here in the morning, I'll have to latch that door quick, keep her out of here, her and her big eyes. Then, come morning, I'll be on my way somewherenot Texas-going on a real trip on a real Greyhound. "Robucka?" "Yes, mam?" "Got chicken." I reach in my pocket and feel of the earbobs that has caused all this peck of trouble. "I got something for you, too, Juanita. The door's open. Just come on. Cabin There is a cabin Down the hill by Sturgeon Branch In rich bottomland. Rotted wood hangs like flesh On timber bones Surrounded by gnarled Apple trees with small green Fruit of crisp waterThe volunteer grandchildren Of discarded seeds. The other children who grew Here have gone to seed, And have flown like flowers To a distant place. Beneath the scraps of fleur de lis Wallpaper is the news Of 1933 and a recipe For a fancy cake That was never baked Because the wind Forced itself through the cracks In the roughhewn boards and we never Had sugar then, anyhow. -Diana R. Olsen 45 ...

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