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Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama
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A Wrinkle in Time.

BY ANGE MLINKO

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 Is it for this that Meg used to pine?
 The man whose brain, delicate
 with equations, tesseract mirages, 
 responded to commands
 by government ministers
 to voyage from his family toward the seraphim? 

 Is it because Charles never knew him
 that he lies supine
 in the room IT administers
 or because his constitution is so delicate
 it cannot command
 his muscles to do the bidding of his rage? 

 Does the little star perished in the umbrage
 of the sinister black cloud resemble him, 
 Calvin wonders, or does he command-
 eer the vulpine
 forces of the universe against the delicate
 forms to which the good ministers? 

 When Aunt Beast ministers
 to ravaged Meg and her entourage
 she finds words more indelicate
 than Mrs. Who, whose whim
 is to quote from Great Books when spine
 is lacking. Mrs. Which commands

 a rich echo: The univerrsse commaands
 thee ...
 Mrs. Whatsit looks like a minister's
 wife to deflect suspicion when she crosses the pine
 woods to the haunted house. Courage
 without love won't do. What is the hymn
 those creatures sing from both throats & wings so delicate? 

 For that he was a spirit too delicate
 to act their earthy and abhorr'd commands, 
 refusing their grand hests, they did confine him
 by help of their most potent ministers
 and in their most unmitigable rage
 into a cloven pine ...


 The children breathe that delicate alpine flower 
 at Whatsit's command, tessering through raging dark 
 to him confined in an interplanetary Soviet ministry. 

 

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