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When I say everything in the world can look beautiful,

When I say everything in the world can look beautiful,

I mean we don’t. I mean the newlyweds on Fremont Street

are drunk on desert sweat and casino light, dancing from bar to bar

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like a thousand gemstones rattling inside a cavern, while you and I barely

manage to glare across this cocktail table, having forgotten how to touch

without flinching. Inside our skin we’re little more than towers of bone

and I don’t know how to keep us stable without tenderness, the vow we made

to treat each other’s wounds like faults in ceramic. Maybe we’re cut too deep

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for mending. Maybe we should try imploding like the Stardust—

wouldn’t it be nice to unearth a boon of buried poker chips

and remarry at every neon chapel on the strip? To collapse into something

bigger than ourselves for a change? Let’s start small, like plumes

rising from an aftermath or pools of runoff leaching opals of lye from ash,

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one black grain at a time. We can press the demolition between our palms

and call it a beginning.  

 

 

Sameul Piccone is the author of the poetry chapbook Pupa. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southeast Review, Passages North, Arts & Letters, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, American Literary Review, and others. He serves on the poetry staff at  Raleigh Review and teaches at Nevada State College.