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      December 26, 2012“Lungs Like a Distance Swimmer” by Weston CutterWeston Cutter

      They’re building a new building inside the old one, have torn down
      walls to make room for new toilets and still lifes of apples and
      stretched on the fencing around the site’s perimeter flaps a sign
      advertising Extreme Safety which is just a fancy way to say yes,
      we already thought of that, we’re professionals, jeez
      , and there’s air
      venting from one of the old windows, air that’s not being fed
      like dinner into all the half-flattened local bike tires and because
      I’m hungry I decide bike tires are hungry and because I can’t ever seem
      to get my lungs full enough I wonder if to create New the workers
      first have to deflate Old or if the lungs of what’s old have to be de-
      screamed before the new shout, that monstrosity, can be erected
      so that it can be razed in thirty years for its failure to anticipate
      the pure gold of new needs, it’s like faulting a bear for not liking
      the right kind of honey, there should be more fencing like this,
      around every thing, the milk in the fridge I can’t get enough of
      even though every time I drink it my body retunes to the key
      of groan, around the CD I keep playing like each song’s a firecracker
      to decode, around the blond woman I cannot hold and so can’t stop
      aching to hold, maybe dismantling’s just backward algebra, unbroken
      window as the letter X and if one building’s going up inside another
      what time did the train my future lover’s riding leave Memphis, solve
      for the color tongue, the midnight yes, the yellow I’m sorry
      hard hats the workers wear as they lounge smoking near the mound
      where a tree I’ve now outlived recently stood, they crunch into
      the doomed building seeking old boards marked almost and screw
      by screw undo today’s not-good-enough, make room for tomorrow’s
      yes, this. Color of sigh, brick of almost, doorway to maybe: I’m
      a block past when a worker whistles, I turn back and look at a woman
      crossing the old building’s final exhalations her loose green dress
      clinging to her like a wish, blown.

      from #37 - Summer 2012