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It’s late
and there you are.
The buzz still jumping behind your cocoa butter flesh
blood speed through your weary body
you telling me
Donny . . . Donny baby, honey, Gram loves you.
I’m awkward facing this blunt of affection
but believe you I do as
loops of our addictions, sex and liquor, find us both.
And the maroon daylilies in your front yard are wilting,
yet cancer is alive
eating you up and down and love slices pride
when I hear you are leaving the living.
So if I may, for today,
turn my love around to face you, knowing generations have the tenacity to store
one affliction for another,
numbness housed deep in flesh,
pressed and wet, and Gram, if only I had the strength,
I would eat that numbing away so quick
you’d think you were born again.
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Donnelle C. McGee is a faculty member at Mission College in Santa Clara, California.
His work has appeared in Controlled Burn, CQ, Colere, Permafrost, Home Planet News, Iodine
Poetry Journal, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Willard & Maple, among others.
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