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Sean Patrick Hill
When This Wedding Dress Burns
you'll catch yourself blurring
before the polaroids are even shot, the shutter slow
as marzipan melting in an attic window.
Years from now the bride says, The way it is is the way it
is
without you, the groom trying an ever-increasing number
of fire exits, all the doorknobs made of broken glass.
Try as you might, you'll never erase those vows
as you two turned from the judge,
the flowers in the aisle already sagging-
What do we do now?-Pretend you're happy.
When This Witness Post Burns
the town I platted in my album leaves will disappear
into the sawgrass. I will be left, as you and I that day,
on windswept Hurricane Ridge, the impossible mountains.
Each peak frosted with sub-zero sky, but here the deer
browse close. We walked over corroded snow, out
onto cliff dust. Why is it I've such trouble feeling this cold?
Do I not bend so low for you as for these blooms
of prairie smoke? Avalanche lilies flowering from the ice?
My marred photos of that buck in the firs, lupine gone to seed.
What's one more missed opportunity, one more pursed vista?
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