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Duras (The Word)

M.D. feeds her words into the machinery. She presses herself into

the text: sweat, blood, excrement.

It is a vile exercise. It is exquisite, this mysteriousness, this act of

brute survival.

One thinks of feeding; of pressing oil-soaked bread into the open

mouth of a hungry child.

It is vulgar, it is death. It is the white smear of sex.

Piled up, her words are a tower of filthy bodies.

Hunger, poverty, the deep stain of destitution. A clamor of dark

bodies leaning against the grime-stained walls of the city.

She feeds the words into her small blue typing machine. The letters

stick. They stick.

She presses her liquor-stained fingers onto the plastic glide of the

buttons: “M.” “D.”

from Guidebooks for the DeadFind more by Cynthia Cruz at the library

Copyright © 2020 Cynthia Cruz
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.

Published in Cynthia Cruz Poems

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council, a State-based program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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