Cheryl Wood Ruggiero The 2River View, 9.4 (Summer 2005)
Old Woman at the Warm Spring Listen

I see myself simplify,
warmed from structure
into mist,
rising.

My faults,
wreaking fiery cracks
across my soul's sea floor,
secreted under
the hardening lava
of ordinary lies,
are simply, now, my faults.

And my breasts,
floating in this sulphur-scented water
like pale balloons
in loose and blue-veined cauls,
are simply, after all, my breasts.

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