Guest Author

Aliki Barnstone - Poet, Translator, Critic, Editor, English Professor

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Take a Deep Breath

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Of course, you are afraid to breathe—of what

enters you if you inhale fully—smoke

seeps from the car beside you. When you stop

 

for red you slyly observe the couple breathes

together. Cigarettes punctuate their speech,

their bodies slouched against the gray interior.

 

The cars idling ahead of you exhale

too much. The sun is filtered by exhaust,

exhausting you. You think of what is next

 

to do and squeeze the steering wheel and hold

your breath, aghast you can’t help that you find

the gasses lovely, belly-dancing there,

 

beckoning and winking and wriggling

on asphalt between puffing, lustful cars

that sit expectant on their fat asses, drunk

 

on our velocity, oh holy god--

what if you felt your body and what if

you took a breath, the living form of it

 

inside you, and you felt the ghosts of cars

inside you, too, the giant neon guitar

outside the Hard Rock Café on the corner

 

of Paradise twanging amid your ribs,

and all the splendor of inanimate

objects left you just as they entered you.

 

What if the couple enclosed in the car

were no longer ugly to you and all

the oxygen coursing in our blood

 

made you love them for an instant, made them

perhaps glance over at you, perhaps not.

The light changes to green, adorned with halos

 

of toxins. You look down at your splayed legs,

admire them, too. A pity you’re impelled

to take a breath, step gentle on the gas.

 

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"Take a Deep Breath" is from Bright Body (White Pine Press, 2011)

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Biography and Poems

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