{"id":1265,"date":"2008-06-02T19:59:43","date_gmt":"2008-06-02T19:59:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=1265"},"modified":"2008-06-02T19:59:43","modified_gmt":"2008-06-02T19:59:43","slug":"another-new-prose-poem-by-william-doreski","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/another-new-prose-poem-by-william-doreski\/","title":{"rendered":"Another new prose poem by William Doreski"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font size=\"2\"><span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;\">Dumping my Dead Uncle&#39;s Clothes<\/span><br style=\"font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;\"><span style=\"font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;\">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <\/span><br style=\"font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;\"><br style=\"font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;\"><span style=\"font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;\">As I dump my dead uncle&#39;s clothes in the Goodwill box the cold crawls over me and the orange tones of shopping-center arc-lamps feel brazen and fiery on my flesh, the way the glances of mourners must have felt to my uncle as he lay face-up in a suit worn only four times in life. <\/span><br style=\"font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;\"><span style=\"font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;\">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Dumping clothes bagged in plastic is cruel as hefting bundled meat.&nbsp; Only when death exposes the bone can we see each other wholly naked, devoid of the cant of Freud and other sex-mongers, and determine if the forms we lived by were sufficient to sustain us against the grief prescribed by the sacred books we&#39;ve devoutly avoided reading.<\/span><br style=\"font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;\"><span style=\"font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;\">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Beyond the highway, down a slope of leafless oak and hickory, the river waddles to its fate in curves as clumsy as the handwriting of a child.&nbsp; My uncle fished there twenty years before I was born, his big face sunburned and innocent, the war so distant no one could hear the next crop of soldiers being born.<\/span><br style=\"font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;\"><span style=\"font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;\">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The bags of clothes drop into the box like kittens into a pond.&nbsp; The silence they instantly absorb is permanent.&nbsp; The death of my uncle is now his dearest possession, the arc lamps brave as torches in a catacomb.&nbsp; The cars in the parking lot glow like the shells of extinct insects in a glass museum case.<\/span><br style=\"font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;\"><br style=\"font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;\"><br style=\"font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;\"><\/font><font style=\"font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;\" size=\"2\">\u2022 William Doreski says &#8220;My stuff has appeared in a bunch of magazines and several shabby books, most recently <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Another Ice Age<\/span> (AA Publishers, 2007).&#8221;<\/font><br \/>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dumping my Dead Uncle&#39;s Clothes&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; As I dump my dead uncle&#39;s clothes in the Goodwill box the cold crawls over me and the orange tones of shopping-center arc-lamps feel brazen and fiery on my flesh, the way the glances of mourners must have felt to my uncle as he lay face-up in a suit worn [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose-poetry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}