Irene Cooper
Site
In basements
we wrenched lungs
of laundry detergent
and soot
Look
there’s no sense
now
wagging our
forked livers
at our shame
and its con-
stituents
(the joists of us
warp under
the weight
clarity we carry
like a pane of
glass between us
filmed soapy
and slipped
through baby
fingers)
we salvaged
the frame
let’s rest
our gaze on
some open field
Irene Cooper’s poems have appeared in the Oregon Poetry Association anthology, Verseweavers, as well as in Indolent Books’ anthology, Poems in the Aftermath, on the online project What Rough Beast, in The Feminist Wire, and in Utterance: A Journal. She is a freelance copywriter and essayist, fledgling novelist, and co-editor of The Stay Project, which explores and encourages artistic impulse in the current political moment.
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