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Dave Eggers' The Wild Things is available for preorder, in regular hardcover and
limited-edition fur-covered.

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Crusaders.

F.V.

BY KIKI PETROSINO

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 The note you dropped became a bird.
 It sleeps in my chest. 
 Wings abjure in dreaming white. 
 How fast it dreams. 
 How slur. 
 A silence in the canebrake. 

 When we came to the canebrake. 
 I tore my yellow coat. You spoke to a bird. 
 Tall slur
 of sunlight on the water's chest. 
 In dreams
 you take my coat into your white

 shell mouth. I race among the hard white
 stalks of cane, breaking
 my feet sharply against their gloss. I dream
 a bird
 lands on the wooden desk in my chest
 to slur

 its bones with ink. You slur
 above me like white 
 linen rolling outward from a tea-chest. 
 Come. We can sleep in the canebrake. 
 I know a bird
 who drops down. Dreams

 are falling from its beak. And some dreams
 even slur, 
 so that the bird
 may stay and speak to both of us, more white
 for our time in the canebrake
 sleeping chest 

 to chest. 
 How the bird trebles in our dreams
 of what can break. 
 Inclining hard into the slur
 of small exits. White
 houses fold. Each roof a bird

 moving in the slur
 that cane-stalks make as turning white
 we fill with birds— 

 

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