Priscilla Frake
Towers Want to Fall
Banks want to fail.
Also crops and marriages.
Infections are like tinder,
waiting for any excuse to flare up.
This also goes for tempers
& wars. Guns want to fire
and bombs sit hopefully ticking,
curled around a red spark.
I myself want to burn
all my bridges. Flammable
words are coiled on the tip
of my tongue. Someone
inside my head promises
a world in which I
am limitless, untouchable,
triumphant—
and only patience, that
most trying of virtues,
tiredly tells me
to pull myself
back from the brink.
Priscilla Frake is the author of Correspondence (Mutabilis Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Nimrod, Midwest Quarterly, Medical Literary Messenger, Carbon Culture Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and The New Welsh Review, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2017), edited by David Meischen and Scott Wiggerman; Enchantment of the Ordinary, (Mutabilis Press, 2019), edited by John Gorman; and Women. Period. (Spinsters Ink, 2008), edited by Julia Watts, Parneshia Jones, Jo Ruby and Elizabeth Slade. Frake lives in Asheville, NC, where she is a studio jeweler.
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