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November 2012

    Credits

  • Photography by Sedrick Miles
  • Editors:
    Tishon Woolcock
    Caits Meissner
    Anna Meister
    Nora Salem
  • Editor's Note:
    Other Names for Home

November 2012

Times of Grace

by Emily O’Neill

When your name begins
a sentence, the story
won’t start without
fracture.
You dress as other
selves, but the shudder
in your owl eyes
stays.
I unravel
the distance between. Fall,
much colder for it. I miss caffeine
teeth, the train
echo grown
louder once leaves

drop. Sugared night
drives; cracked cement
pool; library floating
in flooded cellar.
The after dark.
The Porterhouse. Three
whiskey smile. Prying the safety
from your lighter. Sid
and Nancy, a lullaby.
I keep each memory separate so
they cannot argue about you.
You say
your grandmother has two
Bell Jar first editions,
that you’ll steal one for me.
Lead me to the kitchen
hands over eyes
to a green-keyed ’61 Remington
Portable.
I have seen you
dressed as other selves
and I do not believe
break. Circling a single question
too dangerous to attempt:
Who loves you more than me?

About Emily O’Neill
Emily O’Neill is a proud Jersey girl who tells loud stories in her inside voice because she wants to keep you close. Her most recent work is appearing this fall in Paper Darts, Sugar House Review and FRiGG Magazine, and her poem ‘A Spade, A Spade,’ was a finalist in Gigantic Sequins’ first annual poetry contest, judge by Nick Flynn. She is the poetry editor of Side B Magazine and has a degree in the synesthesia of storytelling from Hampshire College. You can pick her brain at emily-oneill.com.

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