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Grandmother’s sixpence

It’s snow white like the noise of gaslight A wisp feather voice of nineteen-nineteen

She sings sweet to the swoons of her princes Who flip coins.


With fleet feet she plucks them

Like seeds a sparrow-thin wrist twists the trinkets Between her teeth and spits

Green copper.


Seeps a silver sixpence through to my shelf of knick-knacks One hundred hundred hundred fingered

To a moon-blank face of her that was the fairest of all.


February 19, 2015