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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:

Girl Before a Mirror: Unclassical War

Ralph Monday

The garish girl reaches out one arm to
embrace the impossible, a longing
for self split in two by powers and
principalities predating the splashed
form sprawled flat across the canvas like a
coat of many colors Joseph found in
an Egyptian flea market on Palm Sunday.

Even in this deconstruction she is
molded by Picasso, a man who spent
his life surrounded by naked women.
Stripped bare while clothed, sister to all before
her, only the Novocain face reveals
that this is not a painting—this is war.

Squares, stripes, circular curlicues, visual
musical notations where the old old song,
brushed onto canvas like tattooed stories,
pressed into clay as early 20th century
cuneiform script by the painter’s deliberate
stylus, conjures up as smoke breathed into
broken bottles, all her wayward kin.

Staring into the mirror is Einstein’s possibility,
Dali’s melting clocks—neuromancy of the
living dead—Eve, Pandora, Helen, wayward
Lilith, all comb their hair, rouge lips, touch up
eye shadow, girl-talk their crippled sister.

Cut up on history’s butcher block, dissected
by desert rules, these are past things still
ruled by Picasso priest, mirror a confessional
where fragmented transgressions are the
messiah’s, not the sinner. She gives birth
to some monstrous penis, duality of balls,
while she remains in a reflected womb,
sawed up by all the stories ever told.

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