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Charlie Smith was born in Georgia and served in the Peace Corps before graduating from Duke University and the University of Iowa. His eight poetry collections include Red Roads, selected for the National Poetry Series and Great Lakes New Poets Award; Word Comix , and Headlong (Norton, 2013). Smith has also published seven novels, among them Cheap Ticket to Heaven, Chimney Rock, and Three Delays (Harper Perennial, 2010), as well as a collection of novellas, Crystal River. Two new novels, Men in Miami Hotels and Ginny Gall, will be published by Harper Perennial.

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Three Poems

by Charlie Smith
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If Anything Can

Of those dark days

at the end of August, the sky mixed up
befouled grisaille, breeze harvesting rain off to the west—
an imperial, catastrophic weather like bad debts

called in, delicious, really,
like works of art where we inhabit pain

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