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enjoy this writing from Allison Grayhurst in the free 2015 chapbook: Make the Wind (click on the front cover image or the title text to download the free PDF file)				You can also order this as a 2016 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the book cover spread to order Make the Wind as a book at any time!

Purged

Allison Grayhurst

Worn, magnified destruction
the crime of ancestral imagination,
crimes in your soup bowl,
on your forehead, marking like
a stain cross your face.
Come by home through the labyrinth
of your self-hatred. It was never yours,
only yours by default, only your father’s organ music,
only your mother’s chained solidarity to a monstrosity,
and you, lying flat on your single bed in
your simple room watching the firestacks
from the chemical factories, past the railroad,
far from the river where you would bike to
to claim yourself some peace.
Beer bottles and ashtrays and the harsh unpredictability
of irrational bitterness coiling in his dark eyes, distorting
his once handsome face – Do you know you are free?
In this mansion of hard-won truth, love as tough as marble,
blooming always on unexplored shores, counting on you
to thrive. You are mighty and you are needed. Do you know
you are strong, a masterpiece, a hero? It is better this way,
to have been crushed, eliminated, earning yourself such
raw beauty. You are safe because you have been emptied -
a cherished dream reduced to cinder, and you have survived,
a mighty force of love, my love, my eyes.
Despair is a weighted ghost, a guide who has finished its deed.
I love you even more with your softened rage
and your surrender. I love you like I have always loved you like
the first knowing of who I have finally found

a choir pure, vibrating grace into my bones,
feeding, formidable -
endless food, endless rest.

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