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One Breath: A Poem

Somewhere in the antipodean blue
The old salt sea rustles anonymously
Darkened by nocturnal ink
Busy and dark the currents, the old fingers
Wedge themselves into sea rock and heave
The world and all her nations along the ancient fulcrum
While here the lemon-bright Sun
Beats and throbs like passionfruit
Soaks the green world wet with light
And folds each shadow according to its image
Lord, here I am, I am
A mango rind on the kitchen floor
A single strip of protozoan matter
Bearing one charge, to set my spark
And with the passionate essence be calibrate
Here the body shall break, multiply, diminish, proliferate
Here it shall be pinched by thumbs old and young
Rich and poor, fair and unfair
For nothing is equal, not even equality
Even the darkness is not dark to You.
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Raymond Dokupil is a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He co-hosts a culture and literature podcast: Unreliable Narrators.

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