Love in Mississippi


is always a metaphor. Sheep
grazing on the shorn heath,
the grinding of vegetables
into a cool green soup.
Corridors of halogen
mark the straight
routes home, the turns
we miss or accidentally take.
Like the housewife pansies
or the woman who owns
a badger and leashes
it in the park. Rather no,
that was love in New York
where the rivers erected
themselves in the patchwork spring
and the windows were so small
even I could not slip through.


  -Erin Elizabeth Smith

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