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Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton

Again and Again and Again

You said the anger would come back
just as the love did.
 
I have a black look I do not
like. It is a mask I try on.
I migrate toward it and its frog
sits on my lips and defecates.
It is old. It is also a pauper.
I have tried to keep it on a diet.
I give it no unction.
 
There is a good look that I wear
like a blood clot. I have
sewn it over my left breast.
I have made a vocation of it.
Lust has taken plant in it
and I have placed you and your
child at its milk tip.
 
Oh the blackness is murderous
and the milk tip is brimming
and each machine is working
and I will kiss you when
I cut up one dozen new men
and you will die somewhat,
again and again.

Other works by Anne Sexton...
Rapunzel

A woman who loves a woman is forever young. The mentor and the student
 1
For the Year of the Insane

O Mary, fragile mother, hear me, hear me now although I do not know your words. The black rosary with its silver… lies unblessed in my hand
 1
Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women

Perhaps I was born kneeling, born coughing on the long winter, born expecting the kiss of mercy, born with a passion for quickness and yet, as things progressed,
The Road Back

The car is heavy with children tugged back from summer, swept out of their laughing beach, swept out while a persistent rumou… tells them nothing ends.
Ghosts

Some ghosts are women, neither abstract nor pale, their breasts as limp as killed fi… Not witches, but ghosts who come, moving their useless arm…
The Evil Seekers

We are born with luck which is to say with gold in our m… As new and smooth as a grape, as pure as a pond in Alaska, as good as the stem of a green bea…
 1
Young

A thousand doors ago when I was a lonely kid in a big house with four garages and it was summer as long as I could remember,
Lessons in Hunger

‘Do you like me?’ I asked the blue blazer. No answer. Silence bounced out of his books. Silence fell off his tongue
Raccoon

Coon, why did you come to this dan… with a mask on? Why not the tin ma… and his rainbow girl? Why not Rac… his hair marcelled down to his che… Why not come as a stomach digestin…
Lullaby

It is a summer evening. The yellow moths sag against the locked screens and the faded curtains suck over the window sills
 2
Venus and the Ark

The missile to launch a missile was almost a secret. Two male Ph.D.’s were picked and primed to fill it and one hundred
Kind Sir: These Woods

Kind Sir: This is an old game that we played when we were eight… Sometimes on The Island, in down… in late August, when the cold fog… off the ocean, the forest between…
Live

Well, death’s been here for a long time — it has a hell of a lot to do with hell and suspicion of the eye
The Fury of Abandonment

Someone lives in a cave eating his toes, I know that much. Someone little lives under a bush pressing an empty Coca—Cola can a…
The Red Dance

There was a girl who danced in the city that night, that April 22nd, all along the Charles River. It was as if one hundred men were…
 1



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