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the play of licorice on

Posted on 12.13.19 by Alison Cantrell

Poetry by Irene Cooper

the breath
is everything i understand about desire
before coming to devotion. i watch a blue jay
charge its fledging, knock it from the fence
to force its flight. instead it sort of falls
into a low and prickly raspberry bush
as co-parent scans for crows, for cats,
a kind of good/cop, bad/cop partnership.
our model was less experiential—love birds
danced in the kitchen, winged it, made passion
look easy as falling from a tree. thistle sharp
and hard to get to, i’m more artichoke than avian,
grounded. but you, you drank up that sweet romance
like nectar, like medicine, like it was your job.


Irene Cooper’s poems and reviews appear online and in print. She is a freelance copywriter, facilitates creative writing workshops in Central Oregon, and co-edits The Stay Project. Committal, her first novel, is forthcoming from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in 2020.

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