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      January 27, 2014My Picnic with LolitaJack Conway

      I brought the cherries.
      I hoped for heart-shaped sunglasses,
      a lollipop, from the movie poster.
      I walk to class so weary of hearing them talk.
      Poetry isn’t literary, I quote.
      It doesn’t know the parts of speech.
      Write what you know, I say,
      trying to make it sound new.
      She tells me her parents died,
      at a picnic, just like this.
      “Lightning,” she says, and I think,
      Billy Collins beat me to it already.
      “Lie down,” she says, “Take your coat off.
      I’ll rub your back. I did for Nabokov.”
      I do as I am told and think,
      this is why he invented her and I invited her.
      Someday, she will wish to be pretty one more time.
      Later, at my desk, I feel a shooting pain up my arm,
      a tightness in my chest. So this is my death.
      Here. Now. With so many papers still to correct
      and wish I could have died at my picnic, with Lolita,
      by lightning, instead.

      from #20 - Winter 2003