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Celebrity Did he die or write a book? It’s all the same. I heard his name. Would I know her by a look? I hear she’s famous and not nameless. If he died I’d remember. There’d be a fuss: he wasn’t us. They couldn’t live forever, but I’ll miss them. Whoever. Tell Me II Your lie is my exaggeration. I trim the truth finely to fit the facts. You sometimes tell me what you think I want to hear. Sometimes when you tell the truth there is air in it for us to fly in before we sit down and mourn what is missing SUE DWYER BOOKS & THE CULTURE Her Life Returns to Her like a Test in Seventh Grade For some time she thought she could continue as her dog continued to carry his great heart on the same rounds, down the streets of New Hill, where the lace-curtained windows sallowed and the fence kept in the rabbi’s goats. She thought she could walk the routine lane around the field of corn where children like the ones who had been hers had torn the green ears and stomped them onto the ground. But it was August, the cicadas crackled in the wild carrot, and the ground was dry and prophetic. In the woods beyond she began to hear gunshot, too early to be legal, and it seemed if her heart was once again in her mouth like clay. What was wrong? No one was dead, no one was missing, but her life had become a tedious school. She sat at the head of the row, where she must take her spelling test to the end while the others passed theirs one up. She remembers how hers returned with little x’s on it, the letters she had misplaced. So this is how the heart and the earth are linked she thought, the heart at earth’s beginning, the earth at heart’s end. She wondered if she would ever spell anything right again. LOIS MARIE HARROD Sue Dwyer is a social justice activist living in Toledo, Ohio. She worked many years as an English teacher, is on the editorial board of Linkages, and has published chapbooks of her poems, including The Chili Sauce Factory and RaSpberry Season. Lois Marie Harrod’s most recent book of poetry, Part of the Deeper Sea, was published by Palanquin Press in South Carolina. Her earlier books include Every Twinge a Verdict and Crazy Alice. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including American Poetry Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, and Green Mountains Review. A poetry editor’s insomniac wondering: do the people whose poems we place side by side like one another’s work? I have an instinct Dwyer and Harrod would, though the size and style of their poems vary greatly there is something refreshingly true and tothe-point in both their voices. \(If Dwyer wrote the test, I think HarJULY 3, 1998 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 25