Jeni Olin
BLUE COLLAR HOLIDAY


Meryl Streep

Kissing men is like eating white bread with nothing on
Winter. Carnal boredom. Heavy as a milkweed seed
in a shy world of neutrons. To doubt physics is to be
self-ironical. Loaded with grace, I "fell through"
the headache system. The only truth is style is what
I was telling her...that feldspar causes fatigue
like stage directions for a kid with one kidney, crestfallen
or falsely upbeat, like on divorce weekends
with Out of Africa, the picture of the season in which they all get closer
to an annex and blood samples, or Lamaze-class passive
like meryl streep after a bout of syphilis, deportments easy
with the bathing platform & the denouement, flowering
effortlessly as a secret-vegetable longing for death
"Sweet Pea," he says, "this is
	where I
disappear for a few moments, I want you to be brave"
so that anyone looking in sees only the archipelago
that is meryl -- the blanched meryl across roughcast walls:
"I am of a torque a beautiful thing for light to turn on"
...brush & ink drawings of hulks egging her on




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