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24
the blackbird said
it was dark inside
and smelled of fire and lard
too tightly packed to move
they pretended it was night
inside the casket of crust
the knife that freed them passed
between two feathers of his wing
and damaged one barb
there was noise then
brightness and confusion
I asked him did you sing
we escaped, he said
we did not sing
Barbara Young was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1947. She writes, “I wrote poetry in high school and college, but quit because I had nothing to say. Tried writing a novel in a month. But did not finish. Five times. Which must make me an optimist, if one with a short attention span. Last April I tried a poem-a-day challenge, and decided that having nothing to say can be liberating.”
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Qarrtsiluni (2005-2013) was a groundbreaking online literary magazine, one of the first to fully exploit blog software. Though we never quite realized our dream of creating a print-on-demand option for each issue, being online does mean that our back issues remain accessible indefinitely, so there's that. And we published some damn fine stuff — check it out.
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