You
look like someone else, and so your life
Becomes entangled with a victim's grief.
Who cares if you're the one? You are the way
Hysteria can triumph and hold sway.
Who cares if you are ruined, and your wife
Can't understand why guilt is leitmotiv
For who she is, and what she will become?
You can't find where the real crook is from,
Or prove your alibi, show law-abiding
People that truth, in panic, has been hiding
Somewhere else. And when the crook's cold glance
Makes mockery of circumstance,
The victims do not pause. They see the fatal error,
But, even now, it's intermixed with terror.
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Kim Bridgford is a professor of English at
Fairfield University, the editor of Dogwood and Mezzo Cammin,
and a resident faculty member of Fairfield's new M.F.A. program
on Enders Island, off the coast of Mystic, Connecticut. She
is the author of four books of poetry: Undone, nominated for
Pulitzer Prize; Instead of Maps, nominated for the Poets'
Prize; In the Extreme: Sonnets about World Records, winner
of the Donald Justice Prize; and Take-Out: Sonnets about Fortune
Cookies, forthcoming from David Robert Books. She is currently
working on a three-book poetry/photography project with visual
artist Jo Yarrington, focusing on journey and sacred space
in Iceland, Venezuela, and Bhutan. A former Connecticut Professor
of the Year and a two-time nominee for U.S. Professor of the
Year, she was the 2007 Connecticut Touring Poet.
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