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          Lily's Room
          By B. D. Lynch

          "Our Lady of the shadows, we lived in the darkness for a while"

          I thought I saw you standing in white
          at the side of the Saint Patrick's Church.
          Right before I was about to laugh

          at our way of always meeting like this,
          I saw that you were really just a spot of marble.
          When Lisa was in the state hospital staring at the ceiling tiles,

          or locking herself in the bathroom again to scream at the mirror.
          I would slip into here, drop a few coins in the box,
          and light a candle for her name and mine. Then duel

          with the devil over the luck of us both.
          Or else I'd wander down to the glass windows
          of the bakery where if I ate enough jelly doughnuts

          and smeared enough powder on my face,
          I could walk away from this all for a little while.
          "Don't leave! Don't leave!" she'd yell.

          When I was gone the house turned evil.

          The faucets shouted German expletives.
          The fan blades twirled like handfuls of razors.

          The furnace hummed like a drunk madman.

          Although now when I think of myself and those days,
          we are standing in her older sister's bedroom

          with the drapes closed, convinced that if we do
          enough slow steps to Louis Armstrong we can

          be changed by something we might borrow from each other.

          The days went on. And for a while, we just kept dancing in the shadows.




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Document last modified on: 02/10/2004

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