There was a young woman
who lived in her shoes.
Bare-backed, she sat
with elders and sheened
her nails with sloe.
Felt purse, trunk,
berries in bottled gin.
Smoke rose
from the purples of the ground.
Moscow maybe next, or
Poland, where the numbers burned.
Purples of the mosses turned.
Some million shades.
Six million more.
Purples of the mosses,
and all the millions, blue.
She had so many lives,
she didn’t know what to do.
Source: Poetry (November 2011).
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This poem originally appeared in the November 2011 issue of Poetry magazine
Olivia Clare was born in New York in 1982 and raised in Louisiana. She earned a BA in English from University of California, Berkeley and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has been published in Southern Review, London Magazine, Poetry, FIELD, and other journals. She was the 2008-2009 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. She is also working on a collection of short stories.
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