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Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood

Is/Not

Love is not a profession
genteel or otherwise
 
sex is not dentistry
the slick filling of aches and cavities
 
you are not my doctor
you are not my cure,
 
nobody has that
power, you are merely a fellow/traveller
 
Give up this medical concern,
buttoned, attentive,
 
permit yourself anger
and permit me mine
 
which needs neither
your approval nor your suprise
 
which does not need to be made legal
which is not against a disease
 
but agaist you,
which does not need to be understood
 
or washed or cauterized,
which needs instead
 
to be said and said.
Permit me the present tense.

#Canadians #Women #XXCentury #XXICentury

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Weeping Nude, by Edvard Munch
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you fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye
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The Small Cabin

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The Loneliness of the Military Historian

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An other sense tugs at us: we have lost something, some key to these things which must be writings and are locked against us
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The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart

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Portrait of Marie Henneberg, by Gustav Klimt
The Landlady

This is the lair of the landlady She is a raw voice loose in the rooms beneath me. the continuous henyard
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Siren Song

This is the one song everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible: the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons
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Angelica Kauffman, by Angelica Kauffman
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She squats, bare feet splayed out, not graceful; skirt tucked around ankl… Her face is lined and cracked. She looks old,
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Habitation

Marriage is not a house or even a tent it is before that, and colder: The edge of the forest, the edge of the desert
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The Puppet of the Wolf

The puppet of the wolf I have not made yet encloses my right hand: fur stubbles my wrists, a tongue, avid, carnivorous,
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Instructions for the Third Eye

The eye is the organ of vision, and the third eye is no exception to that. Open it and it sees, close it and it doesn’t. Most people have a third eye but they don’t trust it. That wasn’...
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Sick Child (Octavi, the artist's son), by Ricard Canals
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You begin this way: this is your hand, this is your eye, that is a fish, blue and flat on the paper, almost
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