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Julia Harden Limboa canker on earth’s face smoking, heaving, glittering life and death life in death flat, a scab, infected coils rising from towers black, acrid fumes they look like poison dripping with contemptuous ease languishing in their sweet defiance of gravity as if this evil can’t limit itself to just the ground it looks still and sickly, silent, unmoving but there is a buzzing barely discernable microscopic, perhaps, to us from our high perch but there, certainly. and we are the gods of this, WE created this reeking thing this animal festering on the ground. Alive or dead—I can’t say. But now we’re sliding away it melds into the haze behind and before me rises a bank of clouds Majestic is the only name I have for them turrets and towers, arches, domes, terraces, halls, a palace— So much more of a city than anything that lies below in our wake. |
[TABLE OF CONTENTS, LHS CLASS OF 2011 EDITION]
Copyright © 2002-2010 Student Publishing Program (SPP). Poetry and prose © 2002-2010 by individual authors. Reprinted with permission.