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You are here: Home / Poetry / What Is Real

What Is Real

Poetry by Abigail Warren

(after Stanley Moss)

If someone else is kissing you, death is real.
I want no others to know your mouth,
its clever tongue
traveling across my topography
the island of my moxie.

If someone else is kissing you,

then let me curse her now—the both of you—
may you fall limp, empty against an outstretched sky
empty of seed, of sense,
no woman will recognize.

But then, if no one is kissing you,
death is real.

 

Abigail Warren lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and teaches at Cambridge College. Her work has appeared in Hawai’i Review, Tin House, Emerson Review, The Delmarva Review, and many others. Her essays have appeared in SALON, and The Huffington Post.  Her recent chapbook is Air Breathing Life (Finishing Line Press, 2017). 

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Call for Submissions: Special Issue on Iran

Call for submissions by Iranian women (trans & non-binary inclusive) writers. Learn more and submit your work here.

New Orleans Review is delighted to announce the publication of its first book, Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance
(Bloomsbury 2019).

Visit the Digital Archive of NOR Print Issues, 1968-2019

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