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by Carl Boon

I shall speak of blue flowers, Blake,
and graceless boys.

I shall watch you behind the glass
of a bar on Lexington

and pummel you with half-rhymes
and the certitude of God.

You’ll fall and I’ll make sure you rise
again, for you must

in this metropol of dragons and chance.
I am the chosen one,

your private savior, superstitious
and lean, lingering where

saints touch men and men cannot
believe. Look at me

and my enjambment, my glass-eyed
superpower. I’m fond of you—

I kiss your breasts as if they were
my own and tell you:

things grow, that’s the only miracle
there is on earth.

Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University.