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Thank you. We hope you enjoy these poems.
This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.
Are you ready boys
Are you ready girls
Are you ready boys
Are you ready girls
—Throbbing Gristle
Contents
2 You’ll Get Better Attention When You Die
7 In the Corner of a Room Where You Would Never Look
8 Terminal
9 Factory
10 Confidence
11 In Which the Pathetic Fallacy Wants to Even More
13 Spring, or, I Don’t Know Everything Is Wrong with Me
14 Honky
15 Worst Things First
16 Speedy
17 Summer’s Other
18 Thunderbride
19 Medusa
20 Dear Rotten Garden—
21 The Editors
22 What Are Predators but Parasites That Kill You Faster
23 Burning Candygram
24 Almost as Good as What We Destroyed
25 The Bell Is a Recording
26 Strategy
27 Pat Robertson Transubstantiation Engine No. 1
28 Pat Robertson Transubstantiation Engine No. 2
29 Pat Robertson Transubstantiation Engine No. 3
30 Pat Robertson Transubstantiation Engine No. 4
31 Pat Robertson Transubstantiation Engine No. 5
32 Pat Robertson Transubstantiation Engine No. 6
33 Historical Action Figures
34 The Perspective Fairy
35 Bowerbird
36 The Year Is Always Two Years Ago
37 Junior National Treasure Cemetery
38 Grief!
39 Better Than Okay, with Androgyny
40 Being Our Pictures
41 A Place I Plan to Admire as Much as One I Can’t See
42 The Anxiety of Coincidence
43 My Brightness Button
44 Look Who Came Dressed as the Sun
45 Poem That Wants to Know If We Need Anything from the Store
46 Poem That Wants to Know When You’re Taking out the Trash
47 Poem That Wants to Serve You Comfort and Despair
48 Poem That Wants to Be Something Rather Worse
49 Poem That Wants to Use Revelation 3:16 as an Epigraph
50 Poem That Wants to Be Less Amazed by a Man in a T-Shirt That Says Similes Liberation Army
51 The Beginning of How We Started Dying
52 Further Strategies for Trapping the Dead
53 Witness
54 By the Number 3
55 Our Fairy Decorator
56 Storylines
57 Clouds Mistaken for Nearby Clouds
58 Two More
59 This Land Is Mylar
60 A Small Gesture of Gratitude
About the Author
Books by Mark Bibbins