What Rough Beast | Poem for August 28, 2018

Irene Cooper
Site

In basements
we wrenched lungs

of laundry detergent
and soot
Look

there’s no sense
now

wagging our
forked livers
at our shame

and its con-
stituents

(the joists of us
warp under
the weight

clarity we carry
like a pane of

glass between us
filmed soapy

and slipped
through baby
fingers)

we salvaged
the frame

let’s rest
our gaze on
some open field

Irene Cooper’s poems have appeared in the Oregon Poetry Association anthology, Verseweavers, as well as in Indolent Books’ anthology, Poems in the Aftermath, on the online project What Rough Beast, in The Feminist Wire, and in Utterance: A Journal. She is a freelance copywriter and essayist, fledgling novelist, and co-editor of The Stay Project, which explores and encourages artistic impulse in the current political moment.

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