“were tempestuously agitated, and nodded thrice, as if bowed by some invisible wearer”
You almost love the things you own.
With a fitful, envious love
like you love the implied lives of fashion editorials. Brief and single-minded,
they have gentle cheeks and throats.
So candy and persistent (your inner lunge for thing).
It sounds made-up,
a human desperate in love with thing.
*
Note: the title of this poem comes from Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto.
Emily Bludworth de Barrios is an MFA candidate at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her poems have recently appeared in (or will soon appear in) B O D Y, The Found Poetry Review, Philadelphia Stories, Emrys Journal, and Belletrist Coterie. Her chapbook, Extraordinary Power, is forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press in Fall 2013.
Matter 
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