Dani Gabriel
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January 20th, 2019

1/20/2019

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it’s always friday night
thanks to tom

your car breaks down,
the pipe busts,
your kid’s temples grow too hot,
your keys get locked in the car,
your girl gets arrested,
and it’s always
friday night.

the office is closed. go
to the emergency room, go
to the after hours extra dollars
specialist, wait
til monday. we have no
further information.

it’s friday night
and you’re on a cold corner
with no coat and no cigarettes.
the music from the bar
blasts.
walk away.
jesus is not in a shot glass,
or at the bottom of that green bottle.
here:
your sister on the phone
with a number for someone
who might know, the
locksmith arriving on time,
a finally sleeping child,
water from the tap.
now
a neighbor with five bucks,
and an extra marlboro red,
and
matches.


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for Mary Oliver

1/17/2019

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for mary oliver

it was not long
after he died.
i was alone in his trailer
packing boxes,
the light that afternoon
was bleach on my hands.
i had only been in the place once.
he had been embarrassed,
in the end, to have ended up
alone, in a trailer park,
with a silver pickup and
a dwindling check.
he didn’t want me there.

and then on the bulletin board
above his desk,
a many times folded printout
of your poem.
he must have kept it in his pocket.
wild geese.
the heading home in it,
the love in it.
he was not always good,
my father,
and i did not always love him.
but we both loved that poem,
and the world it
imagined.

i threw the poem away
but it sneaks up behind me
some mornings
when the light is particularly hot
and dust dances on my desk.
“you do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.”

i am turning toward the possibility
that this is true.


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New Year Prayer

1/1/2019

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a prayer in real time

there are about
a million things
to speak against:

from the definition of ownership
to the desecration of the packed dirt,
from the definition of borders
to the desecration
of my own
body.

words do not erase
the ink on the judge’s papers,
the surveyor’s lines,
the letter stamped on your birth certificate.

words do not
breathe life back into
the ones we love,
or back into
the days we let slip past.

but
these
words are here
to pick the lock,
to lift the window.
please
climb out.
i’m coming too.

this is a prayer
in real time:

listen to it in your
coughing engine,
in that radio commercial,
in the hold music.
this is a prayer
that drowns out your boss
and the bill collector
and the preacher who sells hell.
the world is more
than dust and sinew.

i call you
holy,
i call us holy,
i call it all
holy.







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    dani gabriel
    ​poet/writer

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