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Jude Goodwin
West Coast Amusements
We drive to the abandoned lumber mill.
Everything has been dismantled, there's nothing
left to go rusty in the cold April rain. The girls
don't mourn. Up from the cracked pavement
a carnival has grown, opened its outer tin whorls
and pushed a corolla of light into the grey sky.
On a day when candy floss could run like syrup,
when blue puddles cover every plastic seat,
when no one lines up for the yellow ducks or the blow up
hammers, the girls screech and race,
throw balls and darts, drop their soggy allowances
into the palms of any barker who smiles.
It gets wetter, most of the rides shut down,
the operators smear together
beneath the lizard lady's awning, the money
runs out. We watch as the lights become small
through the back window of our truck and later
my daughter falls asleep clutching treasure -
an orange hippo, a floppy damp fish.
round I, poem 27, 18 April 2006
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| Jude Goodwin
(Squamish, BC Canada), illustrator, web designer. One of Canada's
emergent poets, Jude Goodwin's poetry has been published in various
print and online journals including Comstock Review and Contemporary Verse 2, Eclectica, Wicked Alice, and the Guardian Poetry Workshop. Jude is an editor for WebdelSol's Poetry Forum: the Writers Block, and founder of The Waters, an online poetry workshop. Website: goodwinstudios.com/Poems |
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