Leveler Poetry Journal
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Poem For the Relief of Fallen Women


This wishing well is bottomless.

A penny from heaven would drop


all the way to the Indian Ocean

(Not China, as you were always told)


to land in the hand of some fisherman

as he guts some great, gasping fish,


its eye a coin emptied of value.

They’re always grasping something,


men. Always holding anything but

the bag. You, you’re holding a knife


at an oblique angle to the world,

away from your body, every body.


The cutting board is a map of erasures.

There are all these onions, waiting.


The setting sun above the sink turns

their tight shawls of white skin pink.


But they are merely onions, not fish.

You spit out the hooks. There is no wish.




Gregory Crosby