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19 FARINA (for Joe Stinson) Half listening to a nearby flat screen where the prez is lying his lying ass off the early spring sky looks like it came from an antique store, the dull red spaghetti-western sky of my youth when I would get off the bus and cross the street to the automat, count my change, check the time, and cut class. In the distance two guys my age, classmates, circled Hawk Hill. How I lusted for the waitress in her whites and tiny tennis sneakers, how I stuttered and shook when I ordered, then watched the hot cereal grow brown sugar sunspots and sipped my face through the shattered coffee rings. Across City Line the new draftees who had no deferrals and whose parents hadn’t paid off the draft boards were boarding green Army buses. I could see their mouths move. For years I have been eating the same bowl of farina. I eat it while driving, in the middle of arguments, on the phone, in bed, while fucking, or lecturing on the Romantics and my mouth never moves. It is better than what the gods eat because the gods are immortal and have no remorse. It is my Eucharist, my molu, my manna, my spinach, my flower of immortality, 20 and I am eating it right now between his lying answers because it helps me forget what it must have been like to board a green bus and not eat farina, cut class, smell clean clothes, sip sunlit coffee, or watch two guys of draft age run in endless sunny circles. ...

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