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Friday, April 21, 2006

DEATH ON ASPHALT

by Michele F. Cooper


City crows skirt the Volvos and taxis, train
their satin thoughts on the body of a woman
draped across a boulder of brick and mortar,

last piece of the bulldozed tenement
where St. Xavier’s meets the freeway.
That morning, she was drowning in a sea

of particulars, minutes and presentations,
concepts of operations weighting her shoulders,
phone, fax, and e-mails blasting demands

and directions would make a quill bristle.
She’s wearing a twill suit and patent shoes,
purse still hanging on her shoulder,

lips resigned in a pool of crusty blood,
curls still dressing her golden mane,
blush on the cheek that’s showing.

Look at that! scruffy kid tells his little brother.
She's dead, Tony. That's what dead is, as she lies,
peaceful, on the dirty newspaper, proving it.


Michele F. Cooper is the first-place winner in the 2002 TallGrass Poetry Competition, second-place winner in the 1999 Galway Kinnell Poetry Competition, a finalist in the 2004 War Poetry Competition; she has won honorable mentions in the 2003 Emily Dickinson Poetry Competition, the 2003 New Millennium Awards, and the 1999 Sacramento Poetry Competition. Her poetry and poetic prose have appeared in many journals including Larcom, Fiction International, Paumanok Review, Pedestal Magazine, R.I. Women Speak American Writing, Nedge, CQ, Faultline, Online Poetry and Story, and in a chapbook, Women on Women. She is the author of two books, founding editor of the Newport Review and Crone’s Nest, and of a chapbook series. She lives on a horse farm (not hers) in Portsmouth, RI.