Barely South Review - April 2012

Page 189

EASTING for RenĂŠ Char

JOHN NIEVES

You kept trying to teach me ceremony with stones in your mouth—stones of the river from which the dead washed both up and away. In a forest, mortar shells pass as flora, live a little, grow quietly. Their fruit, silence. Their seeds, archaeology: the skull history leaves exposed. The stones in your mouth.

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