Another first line taken from Emily Dickinson. You can find her original, with excellent manuscript notes, here. Her poem keeps haunting me; it could have been written yesterday, and makes Emily real to me in a way she hadn’t been up til now.

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They shut me up in prose

They shut me up in prose
With essay—gagged—theory
bogging my mind—my voice
stilled by easy praise

With syllables—I picked locks
with lines—unsyntaxed—
freedom—nothing
left to lose

A single sound—ah or
unh— a window
A single word—treason—
an open portal—to I