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Poems

Expecting

By Julia Guez ·

Messengers of a God

 

who seems to be angriest at nightfall

 

when only daughters walk

 

down the aisle on their brothers’ arms

 

instead.  What hasn’t been taken from us

 

by now (or it too would’ve gone

 

the way of the flatware)

 

must be genetic.  The difference between

 

inheritance and inheritance:

 

what you can quit or be quit of—

 

curtains, pearls, words once

 

half-dressed in concern

 

Presbyterian to the point of incomprehensible

 

after noon.  What you can quit, be quit of

 

and what, of course, you can’t.

 

Madnesses on that side of the family

 

passed from one century to the next,

 

for example.  Fear

 

what’s lying in wait

 

in our wives’ if or when

 

it will wax red and rise bone-white

 

dragonish, drawling.  Fore-

 

knowing the trauma, entering on it

 

with full consent of the will and why,

 

if she’s nothing but a madrigal and then some,

 

should we not hope for dahlias?

 

The rent is due at the end of each month.

 

At the end of each month,

 

the same question,

 

sleeplessness—and yes, novenas,

 

TV, nausea.

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Julia Guez

Julia Guez’s poetry, essays and translations have appeared in POETRY, PEN Poetry Series, The Guardian, Circumference, The Brooklyn Rail, and Boston Review. Guez works at Teach For America-New York and lives in Greenpoint and online @G_U_E_Z. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University. Author photo by Ted Roeder.

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We are Blunderbuss Magazine, a web magazine of arts, culture, and politics, an ordnance of fire and improvisation. What ties together these essays, stories, poems, photographs, comics, and other bits of aesthetic shrapnel is a common attitude of visceral humanism. We aim for earnest noise. We want to splash in the mud of lived experience, to battle for a radical empathy, and to provide a megaphone to howling assertions of human subjectivity.

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