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  • Poetry
  • Archives
  • Past Events
    • Fall | 2012 Reading
    • Spring | 2013 Reading
    • Spring | 2014 Reading
    • Fall | 2015 Reading
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  • Submissions
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MICHAEL LORUSS

Among the Living


            If ears ring from a name struck
by tongues flicked against teeth

             in the way a firing pin touches
off a round, sending it spinning

            from a barrel’s mouth and into
the pith of its target, let us

            hear. Let us turn to explosions
on television screens, their glow

            the concussive rush that brands
us as survivors. Insallah.  God

            willing. We are in the fast burn,
the nuance of a suicide bomber’s

            final prayer. Let the news ticker
catalogue a marketplace rising

            cool with the shouts of boys
selling dates, of men gathered

            to smoke tobacco, until heat
radiates from a center-blast,

            expands from its source, names
us among the living.

 


51   The Paris-American

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Michael Loruss is a native Californian, a veteran of the United States Army, and an alumnus of Berea College, where he studied English literature. Currently, he is an MFA candidate in creative writing at Hollins University, and serves as
assistant editor for The Hollins Critic. He is a coordinator for One Night Standing—a community reading series in Roanoke,  Virginia—and is founding editor of DIALOGIST (a forthcoming quarterly journal of poetry and art), as well as assistant poetry editor for Impeachable literary journal. His work has recently been featured in Guernica, and is forthcoming in PANK, No.  8.


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