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Douglas Basford is a poet, a translator, and the author of several critical essays and has received the Der-Hovanessian Prize from the New England Poetry Club, as well as the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, twice. His work can be found in The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry as well as the Diagram.4 anthology. Born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, he earned two MAs from Johns Hopkins University. Basford teaches at SUNY-Buffalo and lives in Buffalo with his wife.

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A Dream of Ease

by Douglas Basford
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When I had gotten to the last of them—
friends, family, neighbors, nemeses all there,
all docile, dully transfixed by the air
above the cliff off of which I shoved them

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