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Laura Mullen | 197 from Murmur I removed the plot. I wanted to hear what they were saying. It is not a Silent World at all, but—we are so distant—we come to think of it like that. I let go of character, working with some uneasy combination of roles, gestures, discourses. I faked the broken arm. Tried pretending I was a cop. Pulled out of context I waited to see how long the girls would try to maintain the fiction: we were just turning down the lonely dirt road because I’d remembered I’d forgotten . . . something. This will just take a couple of minutes. I thought the failure of the definitions would be more obvious: I was always surprised by their trust. Traces a jagged trajectory through an unstable setting, not intact, not What happened to the previous On that strip of exposed beach beside the highway long slender veils of semi-transparent wet mist tear, shiver, and reform in a shifting tableau of strange, half-remembered shapes.A thick smear of blood on the glass wall of the phone booth turns black in the glare of the The corpse struggles to its knees, what you thought was the corpse, and—muttering to itself—starts scrubbing at the bloodstains. It’s too late to offer to help her, clearly. She says, Well, to tell you the truth The corpse sits up—what you thought was the corpse—and, with some difficulty, smooths away the possibly telltale footprints of her would be assassin (but the sand is so vague, who would even think to read them as “footprints”?) as far as she can reach with the arm he didn’t break: a frown. She says If you can’t say anything nice Perched fussily on the living room couch (she’d opened a plastic garbage bag to sit on so as not to stain the upholstery), the corpse refuses to remove the bloody dress. I’m helping her clean her nails: she’s afraid she might have caught a thread from his suit there, or some skin from his wrists. I’ve been trying to tell her she reads too 198 | Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century many detective novels. She sighs. She doesn’t like the tentative way I’m holding her fingers, she doesn’t think I’m going deep enough. Honestly, she says, do I have to do everything As though to say a few words. As though I didn’t kill her. As if Trying to make the technique itself as close to the ocean’s as I could get it: going over and over the thing, saying it, taking it back, pushing it up as an instant’s offering—at the tide line, script of seaweed, shells and stones, sand dollars, trash, foam scum. Written on the shifting stuff in the swift shine of the wet already vanished…; “Speaking,” Levinas writes, “implies a possibility of breaking off and “It’s not you,”she says,“it’s your father. I can’t believe that—in my condidtion—I’m the one who’s going to have to find the knife,” she shakes her head disgustedly, “and make sure he wiped You: no tracks, no prints, no evidence / I: the cold reproach. Remember: the doors and windows are locked from the inside. (At this point I always like to ask the reader to from Subject Circles (Breath cleared) Window fluttered Edges fragile petal Dust your touch Would tear through caught in ...

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