The American Poetry Review

TWO POEMS

Ode on Departed Slang

Are you still there, —word I used in Hawai’ito describe a wave, a friend’s hair, my pink bikini—, , , , , , all the surfing slangthat faded when I moved to Dixie, the land of ,as in you don’t have a lick of sense, the dames were hit with, all the words that have been lostin the great lingo sea, words I loved or used then tossedeither because their time had passed or I had moved onto another realm, as when my hippie world naked in the courtyard of the world,but nothing changes, think of all the forgotten wordsHamlet uses, , being shortened to — or

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