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January 2018
Christine Gelineau
gelineau@binghamton.edu
My husband and I raise Morgan horses on a farm in the Susquehanna River valley of upstate New York, where I also tend a large garden of vegetables and perennials. I teach at Binghamton University and in the low-residency MFA at Wilkes University.  My poetry and essays have appeared widely and I am the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently CRAVE from NYQ Press in 2016.  For more information please visit my website: http://christinegelineau.com/.
​
Nothing to It


There’s nothing to destruction:
the brutal do it easily
dismantling in an instant
what took months, decades
even centuries to build.


The first door to close 
is the heart, muscle contracted 
down to a fist:  once you’ve closed 
yourself inside that darkness all 
the other barricades, all 
the other strikes feel justified.


Must there always be someone 
to kick the blocks in?
To firebomb the churches and tuck 
explosives into the crevices of ancient 
treasures, mushrooming a civilization’s
legacy into red dust?


Must there always be a hand
to sweep away the fruits of decades 
of bloody protest and slow compromise 
with the flourish of a pen? To tear 
through the safety nets and bulldoze
the protective gates, choking 
the streams with slag,
the air with haze?


Demolition is the instant payoff
—volatile, thrilling, an aphrodisiac
of power.
                   Creation drags along 
in slo-mo, a chick flick
of unfolding and relationships:


how we’re drawn to the swing, the bang,
the rubble, rubbernecking by the wreck 

as if we thought 
obliteration was some kind 
of an accomplishment.  

"Nothing to It" appears in the anthology Like Light (Bright Hill Press, Dec. 2017)
©2018 Christine Gelineau​
Editor's Note:  If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF
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