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Jessica Piazza

PANOPHILIA
          Love of everything

Today this weather’s better than itself:
all background clamor, siren song, our schemed
and ill-conceiving strategies. This shelf,
chaotic and precariously leaning
next to your appalling bed, a trove
of wonders hovering over us. But love
itself I never deigned to love; all give
and giving in. So I don’t understand
my drunkenness on scribble scrawled above
the mirror in the ladies’ room: You’re doomed.
Ecstatic that it’s almost true. And though
I should not love you yet—obliged to slow
and genuflect to sense or self-defense—
because of you, I’ll love everything else.

–from Rattle #32, Winter 2009
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