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Connie Wanek has written several poetry collections, including Rival Gardens, On Speaking Terms, and Bonfire. As an editor of the anthology To Sing along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-territorial Days to the Present, she received several awards. In 2006 Poet Laureate Ted Kooser named her Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress. Wanek lives in Duluth, Minnesota.

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Artificial Tears

by Connie Wanek
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Tears sometimes come in a bottle.
Twist it open and apply drops
several times daily
if you haven’t enough of your own,
if you’ve begun to see light

where there is none,
on a humid night in the country,
black and brooding. Nothing.
And then a lightning strike.
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