Dara Wier’s ninth book, Reverse Rapture, is forthcoming from Verse Press in April 2005. New poems are appearing in Seattle Review, Turnrow, The Massachusetts Review, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Octopus, Green Mt. Review, Denver Quarterly and New American Writing. For the spring of 2005, she is the Louis Rubin writer in residence at Hollins University. She directs the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts. Attitude of Rags Dara Wier It felt like a story sorry it’d lost all its sentences, Like a sentence looking for its syntax. All of the words had homeless, unemployed, orphan Written all over their faces. It had that parboiled, simmering, half-baked look Of curiosity about its mouth, like a month of Sundays Has in the mind of a non-believer, a true back-slider. One got the impression reluctance was waxing. One wanted to say passion was taking a beating. One wanted to say one’s prey to one’s feelings. The feathers of their feelings were all scattered. It was the kind of day were one to see a flock of Creepy baby angel heads attached at their necks to Pitch-black aerodynamically preposterous little wings Clustering at the sum of things, one would rub one’s Eyes, be too faint to respond, much less explain. It looked the way a fence looks just after the last Stampede. A big old blood-colored barn collapsed in Its tracks. Out of hiding came all the hidden cameras. It looked like streets look after a parade’s disbanded. It was the kind of day in which emotions roaming from Town to town, free to be themselves, enjoyed their Rich fantasy lives. This was the kind of day that day Was. We were rags in the hands of a narcoleptic duster.