It’s something like being interested in dollhouse miniatures … Or, you know, putting a ship in a bottle. – Lucia Perillo, on modern poetry
Dollhouses are gilded gingerbread with windows the size of fingernails and furnished with polished plastic picnic tables. They canonize flawless families in flimsy fabric ensembles, delicately assembling copies without originals. The building will be abandoned in the bedroom corner.
A boat in a bottle is a cloud in an hourglass: water kept in a closed circle, tumbled into seaglass. It was made in the century of whale hunts, now clouded by dust and tidal with condensation. My grandfather kept it in his study the way a shark holds its egg purse or how a sailor clutches a locket.
There are so many lives we are not living. There are so many lives we are no longer living. There are so many ways to build with precision.
James Bowie High School
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