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6.3
Joy Ladin
A Little Bit of Ocean

Children squat on a float in the middle of the water. The half-grown deer disappears into a stand of juniper and bullrush. We know shells were once alive, but it's hard to imagine what stones once lived. Hard to be a creature of earth in a world covered with water. I'm not worried about being happy. I wanted to feel: Mission accomplished. I wanted to recognize the shadow I cast, to cast more light than shadow. My daughter and I reach the buoys that hold the rope afloat. Beneath us, darkness, pushing up.

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6.3
August

You haven't, you say, decided to leave me. Our inconclusive future blinks like a boy who's lost his glasses. The sun is going down, the Pleiades haven't showered yet, half-washed students flaunt the misery of beautiful young bodies. We're running away from one another in slow motion, like thighs of an ambivalent elephant ripping itself in half. The moon fills like a basin with milk, ears of corn ripen toward forgiveness. I'm starting to die, you're starting to live. The snake of time pulls its tail from its mouth and tells the end to begin.

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Afterward

After dinner, you browse, leafing through books with small white hands that make me happy to have a body even if it's dying and you are frowning in distant sections among the acid-free paper of skyrocketing young authors who make you feel envious and old, the way I felt before my years withered and fell away, leaving me young and empty-handed, dying quietly among others' poems, in skin from time to time you touch, making me happy down to the bones.

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6.3
Letter to Poetry

Even at your worst, copying copies of your best-rehearsed depressions, you can be handsome, an olive-green wind of aphorism lightly rubbed with wisdom, a courageous widow breathing lyricism into the suffering you survive the way a hammer survives, the way regret survives, pristine and central, in gardens of good and evil, the way death survives as your best-loved season, no matter how often it poaches your favorite singers. You find a way to sparkle through busts and battles, bindings and compilations, and the shy, aristocratic silence still applauds your voices as though each of them were new, and you lived up to each of the endings, the still-great endings, that listen and love inside you.

Joy Ladin ,(joyladin@gmail.com), whose favorite sweet is vanilla ice cream, is the author of six books of poetry: The Definition of Joy, Lambda Literary Award finalist Transmigration, Forward Fives award winner Coming to Life, Alternatives to History, The Book of Anna and Psalms; her seventh collection, Impersonation, is due out in 2015. Her memoir, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, was a 2012 National Jewish Book Award finalist. Her work has appeared in many periodicals, including American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and North American Review, and has been recognized with a Fulbright Scholarship. She holds the David and Ruth Gottesman Chair in English at Stern College of Yeshiva University. Some recent publications:
"Balance" in Lavender Review
"Letter to Death" in Extract(s)
"Letter to Failure" in Prime Number Magazine