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Source material: “Ideas are as real” by Jessica Roeder. Her new chapbook of erasure poems, Trees Full of Walking, is now available from Dancing Girl Press.

Roeder’s inspiration: “a line (these ideas, which were also realities) chosen at random from Molly Lynch’s novel The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman.”

The subtitle about birds not being real is a reference to a satirical conspiracy theory, Birds Aren’t Real. But then again … have you ever seen a baby pigeon?

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Here is the poem:

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I don’t generally either save or talk about outtakes, but “Ideas are as real as” spoke to me, over and over. And then over some more. Here are some of the outtakes.

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