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Poetry by Alina Stefanescu

Glenn Gould’s Favorite Color Was Battleship Grey’

Evidently, this is the ideal hue in which to

dissipate on the first day of spring, when layers of hot yellow

pollen cover the porch swing. Allergists are everywhere

like sexual sadness and microplastics but hearts must be hard

grey like Gould’s metallic raft. Of course I woke up

from a failed mantra. No birdsong, no Bach when

licking lust’s dust from my forearm. Inseminate

me, I said to the rowdy yellow flotilla. My friends say I’m totally

intellectually promiscuous which is the footnote to being

so empty that intellectual masturbation begins

to fail regularly. On a day without books, my brain

is a Build-A-Bear workshop at the mall and I am

the thing kids are building, the being that needs

to be patched together by small dinosaurs who know

themselves better than the adults who insist

that the dinos are children, which is one way of

owning a mammal to disown the cosmos. No tenor,

no accordion, no peanut sonata. Friends are there

for the remainder in that solo, tangelo polyurethane ear

which is as close as I’ve come to a livable homeland

when I’m being faithful to hues or to heritage.

Alina Stefanescu

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