The Paris Review

Nick Laird

CINNA THE POET

I was trying to write like an adult.
I had children.
I was at the end of something.

As I waited at my table by the window for the coffee,
I saw that the sirocco had deposited
a scrim of dust on the sill overnight,
and it was the dark red of powdered blood,
and like any of the others of my kind would have done,
I graffitied it.

In the past, I might have gone for a peace signor a smiley face or an ejaculating penis,but today I scrawled my name in itand my vocation,leaving my fingertip ferrous with desert.

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