The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Slide to Unlock by Julie E. Bloemeke

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Glass City

               returning to Toledo, seventeen years later

To assemble a land,
polish it to sea.

The escape of altered
things. The branches

that follow. Weave
a terrain, parison

in clumsy hands. Learn
to write from refraction.

Add windows, fragile
in their divided ways.

Don’t miss that they corner,
prefer the word pane.

Take the beaker of trees,
the liquid of what loves.

Imagine ponds of glass:
an electric so fragile

it breaks to the touch.
Don’t assume

the name, proclaim
it holy. This is the city

where bones anneal,
where letters glow sand

cells into the body.
Under this rock, another.

Beneath this cobalt, a wing.
Here everything is molten,

kissed, meant to be spun,
the shape of it blown

into being. See how we chase
memory, distortion,

even as it shatters in our hands?
Look: when I hold it all

the sun burns every reflection,
fires it back to new.

Is it any wonder then
I will call on the I, the you,

our past, this city,
word them into glass too?

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