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Emily Bludworth de Barrios

We broke into the light and/or out into the dawn. / We were like a movie.
We were not like a movie.


Andres Fidgets with the Inner Mechanism of the Country

Andres fidgets with the inner mechanism of the country
By which I mean he works inside a financial institution
Like a man inside a gray metal factory or tinkering in the bowels of a deep ship
By which I mean he makes the country work
And which you probably think is cruel, evil, selfish, insulated, or unconscionable
To which I would suggest that you are ignorant of the way reality functions
To which I would say someone invests in something and that is how it comes to pass
For example vaccines vehicles fuel supply fresh produce
But many suffer you say
It is not fair that many suffer
It is like a suffocating damp helplessness placed onto the throat
Yes I would say
The road we travel is cruel and many suffer
The suffering is unfair and not noble
(It's a frozen thing that's dead and cannot be thrown away)

In this House we Loved.

In this house we loved.
We broke into the light and/or out into the dawn.
We were like a movie.
We were not like a movie.
Too much of or too many of our stories are shown to us on a flat screen.
They are flat stories, like a stock photo that shows a man and a woman grinning or
laughing widely making breakfast pancakes and the man with no shirt and the woman wearing
the man's discarded shirt.
I would be nervous to be in a situation like that.
To be so gorgeous and to be so uproarious (in that perpetual state).
They sit down to breakfast then and their delicious words squeeze out into a paste in the
bright house filled with the bright light of morning.
(As if love were a perpetual garland ringing out over beautifully photographed
landscapes.)


Emily Bludworth de Barrios's first full-length book of poems, Splendor, is available from H_NGM_N Books. She is also the author of the chapbook Extraordinary Power (Factory Hollow Press 2014). Recent work can be read in B O D Y, The Pinch, Clinic, Tender, and elsewhere. Find Emily online at emilybludworthdebarrios.tumblr.com.