13 Lines about Walls          —Denise Duhamel & Maureen Seaton

Frost: Something there is that doesn't love a wall.
Joyce: and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall.
A wallflower, I peeked at Mr. Popular leaning against a brick wall.
Wallowing, I wept for Ms. Popular as if desire were a wall-
paper pattern Charlotte Perkins Gilman traced decades before Stonewall. 
What? Have we all become proverbial balls to some caterwauling wall
of fake news? After each hurricane, I replace the drywall 
as if any wall stands a chance against nature. What's a wall
but a makeshift "fuck you," waves walloping the seawall
like walleyes bent on survival. Some walls are metaphorical walls
in the mind of a tyrant who promises a nation concrete walls.
Cavafy: Ah why did I not pay attention when they were building the walls?
Emerson: Murder will speak out of stone walls. 


Maureen Seaton & Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have been collaborating since the early 1990s. Sibling Rivalry Press published their CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) in the fall of 2015. Denise's most recent solo collection is Scald (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017). Maureen's most recent solo collection is Sweet World (CavanKerry Press, 2019). Denise is a professor at Florida International University in Miami, and Maureen teaches poetry at the University of Miami, Florida.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2019