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enjoy this writing from Ralph Monday in the free Down in the Dirt 2014 PDF file chapbook: The Girl Next Door and Other Poems (click on the front cover image or the title text to download the free PDF file)				You can also order this as a 2014 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the cover spread for the book The Girl Next Door and Other Poems

Order this writing in the book What Must be Done (a Down in the Dirt July - Dec. 2014 collection book)		get the 372 page July - Dec. 2014 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

This Time

Ralph Monday

The woman who has lived her life
As an institution, never delved
Into her dark interior and found the
Sleeping shadow, is incomplete, an
Abandoned edifice half constructed,
foundations washed out and rotting.
She has been many things without being
The one thing. No matter if southern,
Northern, western, this is not the
Interior geography—wife, lover, teacher,
Nurse, mother—facades carried
Round in her life-bag. Deinstitutionalize.
Give up soft breasts, mortgaged ownership
of womb. This time will come in the blackberry
Season amid ripening apples, the call
Of migrating birds when separation from
Home, family, the false work is complete.
Then she must swim nude in the cold
Waters, sink into their dark depths and
Embrace the debris, rough sunken stones,
Smooth mud like velvet, become an eater
Of self, so that she sets the feast table.

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