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Bruce Parker
Erasure Poem for a President*
Perceiving that in the masked
attitude there is a hollowness
that beauty can’t redeem,
he let us know
by his hands’ denunciating
upheaval that he despised
us — making it his care
to smother us.
*See Marianne Moore, “‘Nothing Will Cure the Sick Lion but to Eat an Ape’” in Observations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux paperback ed., 2016), p. 20. The title of her poem is a quotation from an unspecified work by Thomas Carlyle.
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