Devil’s Lake

Spring 2012 Issue

Anne Marie Rooney: I want that which is closed

and that witch with her clothes unwrapped. I want the sugar

of it all abouting around me: the table and the cinnamon

stick, that boy bleating outwardly, to and through, without.

I want the lone hair who itches. The which-ones-are-those,

though they depress me like the dickens. Mixing eggs very

cleanly. The dirty less the dirt. I want to be so old I vomit

with it, my skin a crusty paper napkin. It disgusts me, all of:

the litany, the line with no minus, every dry thing crimping

prematurely at its ankles. The sun is a sad sort of white.

It makes me can’t breathe. I want the smell again, the faint

again, the red scorching of knees. Summer pots its scratchy

beads but the bright bride is tired. Besides the lack of burn

she is tired. If there was a seed for my feeling it would be

closed. I would want it. I would want the bitter belch of its

world, and there is (it’s crystal), and I do.

a photo of the author, Anne Marie Rooney ANNE MARIE ROONEY is the author of Spitshine (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012) and The Buff (The Cupboard, 2011). She has won the Iowa Review Award, the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, and Poets & Writers’ Amy Award. She has been featured in the Best New Poets and Best American Poetry anthologies. Born and raised in New York City, she currently lives in New Orleans, where she is a teaching artist. Find her at www.stolenplums.com. More from this issue >