Anonymous Poem:
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FOLLOWING HER
Are you sure, Zoe?
That part of our building: is it not off limits?
The smell that comes from there sometimes—
I pack towels into the cracks of my door.
And the dinginess!.
Even the custodian won’t replace the bulbs.
Now that we’re here, I have an inkling of what draws you.
The corridors tug so, a mazy momentum:
I rush through them,
I am swift around the turns.
Slower now, much slower.
What are these alien growths along the walls?
Some kind of tumor, some kind of villi?
I can’t edge through without being touched all over.
I think they are more alive than I am;
they bear down on my dwindling vitality.
The sanctum that you promised me—
is it around the next bend, the next?
I do not know if I can hold on any longer,
beseiged, as I am, by small flagellents.
I seem to be swelling now, pluralizing,
and my mind that was so keenly watchful
goes dimmer than these shadowy hallways,
darkens utterly, sleeps.
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