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"Old Newspaper Clipping in an Old Novel"

By Michael McFeePosted Tuesday, Dec. 19, 2006, at 6:10 AM ET

Click here to listen to Michael McFee read this poem.

It flutters to the table
but leaves behind a silhouette,
a yellowish-brown rectangle
its newsprint pressed into
the front endpapers for decades,
an inkless stain, inverse bleaching,
the author's obituary scissored
by faithful librarian or fan
casting a shadow bookplate,
its grave a greasy window
we can't quite see through.

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Michael McFee directs the Creative Writing Program at UNC-Chapel Hill. His most recent collections of poetry are Shinemaster and The Smallest Talk: One-Line Poems.

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