The Exhibition of Persephone Q by Jessi Jezewska Stevens

Author:Jessi Jezewska Stevens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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The poets had been in New York all this time. They grumbled about how the city had changed, how they missed the metropolis of decades past. They mourned the sixties, the eighties, the bars that had closed. The sailors, they said, had disappeared. As had the docks. They’d seen everything, these poets, and perhaps this was what made them so ruthless when it came to judging verse. There was a high bar for audience applause, and if a poem was no good, it was met with silence. I don’t think you could have paid me, really, to read a poem of my own. I touched my hair. I missed saltines. Misha and I were among the very few not actively practicing lines, and I watched the nervous woman at my side mumble stanzas to herself. She paused now and then to slip a note card from her breast pocket. Her eyes darted across the text. Boots of lead, she said softly. Boots of lead. Boots of lead. The poem returned to the folds of her floral shirt as she continued reciting under her breath, lips moving soundlessly over the rhymes.

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