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FREEDOMWAYS FIRST QUARTER 1972 masked as denunciations and lament as a choice between eager mirrors that blur and distort us in easy definitions until our image shatters along its faults while the other half of that choice speaks to our hidden fears with the promise that our eyes need not seek any truer shape- our face at high noon particular and unadorned- for we have learned to fear/ the light from clear water/ might destroy us with reflected emptiness or a face without tongue with no love or with terrible penalties for any difference and even as I speak remembered pain is moving shadows over my face and my own voice fades and my brothers and sisters are leaving. Yet when I was a child whatever my mother thought would mean survival made her try to beat me whiter every day and even now the color of her bleached ambition forks throughout my words but I survived and didn't I survive! confirmed, and teaching my children where her errors lay etched across their faces between the kisses that she pinned me with asleep and my mother beating me as white as snow melts in the sunlight loving me into her blood's black bone the house of all her secret hopes and fears and my dead father whose great hands weakened in my judgement whose image broke inside of me beneath the weight of failure helps me to know who I am not weak or mistaken my father loved me alive to grow and hate him and now his grave voice joins hers 32
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Reopened for Editing 2024-02-16 09:58:20