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PRAYER TO A FRONTMAN
by Emily O'Neill

I am knotted with strange swagger. No one knows
its name, or mine. Fumbles are for football. Books,
for the skinny necks. Women, rain through string-calloused fingertips,
and I am not one of them. I am as much guitar and garage and girl

as anything you sing. Let me grow into my shoulders. Buy new jeans,
burn the records before they've been pressed. Head for highway.
Drive until the salt of a strange sea. Lend me a voice like an axel snap,
an engine overheated, oil-smeared hands, truck growl at eighty and a horse,
dead in roadside heat. Hips thrown forward, bass retching through lung.

Call it combustion, collision, caterwaul. Three easy steps.
Lead me to where anger is a part of my sex. Teach me new, ugly
chords. Let the needle prick empty and fall out the other side.

 



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