2 POEMS Deirdre Lockwood
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SPILL
After all these years I will not wear glasses, there's an elegance to pouring I lost every mosquito bite to have been etched clean as glass. not poisons making themselves beautiful: mercuric chloride incarnadine. by the keen meniscus, calculations I liked that it left you out: of charcoaled beakers and sulfuric acid forgetting my clothes, the soles and bread to lips until that day __ LAZARUS Know I am sincere Lord, if you had been here— says Socrates, that what we go to our science loses frequency. once again returned to ground Occam says an afterlife and you, you told me we are more than bags That was Introduction to Biochemistry,
__ "Spill" germinated (decayed?) from the ruby-slipper-like "radioactive shoes" a labmate once kept in her locker, the dosimetry badge I wore clipped to my lab coat like a brooch and Lavinia Greenlaw's poems "The Innocence of Radium" and "A Letter From Marie Curie" (from her wonderful book Night Photograph). The epigraph is from Madame Curie: A Biography (1937) by Eve Curie Labouisse, translated by Vincent Sheean. "Lazarus" echoes Martha's statement to Jesus in John 11:21: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." |