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ta noonan
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Difference Engine: It is early; I am small. Everything is built to tolerance. The priest detours water to my scalp & face. His accent shortens my vowel. He is naming—and renaming—me. Mother corrects him, but I have to do it again. ( I will wait nineteen years for the opportunity. ) Brass gears crank and waver. Engine reads: Gödel, Lovelace, Derrida. Engine prints: psychopomp, mockingbird, chuck-wills-widow. This is assignment, a baptism in variables that spellcheck catches. Input/output housed in separate units. I change my name not to fool God, but to fool myself. It is a trigger. It is past my time. Speak slowly, now. Speak slowly.
first published in, "La Grande Dame est morte! Vive la Grande Dame!"
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T.A. Noonan's The Bone Folders won the 2007 Heartland Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Cracked Slab Books. She edits Flaming Giblet Press and the online journal grain short/grain long. In May 2009, she will receive her PhD from the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers
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