I dream of unmasked riff-raff. Anxiety is collaging my heart: scraps torn from memory, the flattened faces of my friends, a quarter of my granddaughter’s life. Will I ever have glue enough to paste it together?
Emergency. Emergence. Emerge. Resurge.
The speaker is anxious, and the poem shows that anxiety as a kind of collage. Her heart becomes a surface covered in torn scraps: pieces of memory, friends' faces that look flattened, and "a quarter of my granddaughter's life." That last image is the most striking.
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