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The AugurBy Jessica Reidy QuailBellMagazine.com December, full of falcons ripping bodies for their infants' beaks. Fathers preen and hunt poorly and starving mothers circle. The translucent skin pooled beneath my eyes turns red. I used to divine--flights and omens slipped into tea cups. What has me stopped? I look away from the falcon's trailing claws ripping slip-streams apart. When old cards turn an old meaning I put them away. The hares take silence as their place. Arctic foxes keep their fur close-- a reminder of inequality, night, and day. Owls wear their witches' faces and I would wear them too-- I could never hide the evidence behind veils and scarves like stregha women do. In the morning, owl eyes stud their clever skins. Their husbands beat them blank again, but surely, magic could destroy hands and knives flying through air--change them to arctic hares racing across the tundra, white and ready to be devoured. A walk through the polar forest turns up a picked skull, small, with two holes for front teeth since fallen out. Jessica Reidy's work has appeared in several journals including The Los Angeles Review, Arsenic Lobster, Frogpond, Moloch, and Ribbons. She is the 2008 winner of the Nancy Thorp Poetry Prize. She has given readings in Ireland in both Cork and Dublin, including the SoundEye Cork International Poetry Festival in 2009 and 2010, and in 2012 at The Warehouse in Tallahassee, Florida.
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