elsewhere

Mare Heron Hake

Fowling

when a person who was my friend, who once believed in herself, shows the world a picture of how their new dog has been taught to hunt and is proud of the truck bed with the made dead, the colorful pheasant birds all tail and head on their sides, and I wonder what has happened to make this change. did it fall into the gun barrel or wrap itself around the glass blade where the birds hid, to choke off their cry of how the world must be kinder. for an afternoon's hunt, they will never fly again. I do not ask if they will be eaten, or who will pluck the feathers so uniquely formed and will fall away, as too many bodies fall, trampled underfoot and ground under the heel. the dog has only done what it was taught to do, to flush and retrieve, and the man will say good dog, and the woman will say how fast she learned when the hunting bitch swallows the taste of blood from the puncture.

Nicholas Barnes

Something That Happens in Our Eyes

every sunday the cloud agency convenes over its cloroxed prefectures. french kissing the godless green earth. conferring which among them will join the cotton wool stormfront. and which vapor rorschachs will be laid off by the solar mirror ball. from the gobi to the arctic, the department of condensation spends its days rejecting rainy prayers. melting human hopes. deploying drought and flood alike into the once sacred garden. noah’s promise maker has been dead for centuries. all these desk jockeys, these evanescent bureaucrats, they all know the untold truth. they’ve been acting as interim since the junta. they’ve fabricated rainbows in wartime and tropical cyclones too. anything to further the illusion that some sequenced colors are still vows. signifiers of peace. though the centralized government of divine natural phenomena may have ousted its original figurehead, they rule just as hamfisted. if our wishes make it through the chain of command, our merciful pleas are either filed in cobwebbed banker boxes. or manifested into scarce, sore spring breezes. aurora flare ups. summer kite festivals. or even rarer lipstick smudged cocktail napkins. to keep us from total revolt. to keep us docile. to keep us on our knees. to keep us from realizing that sometimes a rainbow is just that. a rainbow. a light breaking. a candle flame tired of its wick.

Fly Again

the birch owl was silent. no hoots. no hellos. in the museum of trees we were perfect strangers. though the silver dollar sunbeams and wind bitten canopy seemed to say otherwise. there, among the ginkgos, japanese larches, and a lone magnolia named alfred, i gave up my dreams of living high. again. a soul too heavy and bones too dense to reach such heights. anymore. his golf ball eyes landed on me. he could see my heart race like a shrew in that perennial witching hour behind my ribs. searching me like an x-ray machine, he found the bruised liver. the lungs like forest fire kissed hillscapes. all those innards kerosened in the name of self-liberation. a brain driven a million miles a minute on empty. my soft broken mind. terrified of other people, me people. his telescopic raptor gaze parted the curtains on all my rice paper secrets, like he was saying i know you. your inmost walls. a god-hollow victim of dopamine. but who gave you your whirligigs, gyrating on their way to join the dying ferned humus. and who made within you the need to numb up to get through these tiny days. you’re already halfway turned around, nose in the dunce cap corner. keep spinning, and keep your eyes open. you’ll catch more mice that way.

Emma McCoy

Eve’s Birth

There is evening and there is morning, the sixth day, overcast, clouds casting translucent shadows along the ground. Warm, fresh, with water running nearby and a wavering kind of wind that makes the willows move. Grass like goose down. Ant lines weaving in loosely stitched seams. Eve wakes in the hollow of a maple tree, tucked between the roots, sharing a badger’s burrow and the litter of young. She stirs, cubs tumbling over each other with little cries, and she crawls out gently, hesitating, feeling out hands and elbows and toes and the long curl of hair, the dips under arms, the thin skin between fingers and the knob of bone at the base of a neck. She splays out into the grass, discovers sensation— morning dew in her mouth, the taste of dirt. She tongues the ground, swirls dirt in her mouth, spits it out. The prickle of burrs, wind moving the fine hairs along the spine, an ant crawling over the palm. She finds she can stand. The sky is patches of blue and gray. She presses her fingers to her eyelids and pushes until bright dots appear and it hurts. She blinks, feels her aching ribs, the jut of hip-bone, all the bumps along her knees. She counts her toes, then pulls on the nails and learns to leave them alone. There’s a rustle, wind moving something, air rushing into her mouth. The trees, tall, and leaves, They move, rustle, the sound beautiful, as if beauty were planted in her, its own kind of seed. And when she sees what is among the branches, she feels an ache—in her stomach, her mouth, her throat. It is good, she thinks, and reaches for a peach. She hears something, a voice, more herself than not. She turns.

Kelli Rule

The Ghost

Shotgun shack, my old home, in decay. They blew it away with a new coat of paint: goddamned millennial gray. Watch me: push through bare heart pine with both hands: I’m inside your walls fighting fiberglass, lungs drowned in piss-colored clouds, the sharp stuff scratching me (the soul of this place) in every wall of every room, in the bones you say are good. My palms are pushing, pulsing, my lifelines expanding and fusing with cables and wire, not up to code you say but they worked. The wrong end of rusted handmade head-plastered nails tear me open...do you feel me? Oh — a bottle, tombed in for fun. Meant to be found by someone, but not for five hundred years. I knock it down. You hear it — you stop: the tinkling sound.

Leath Tonino

Cabin

There was no Mickey, just mice. And mouse poop that got into everything. The pit toilet was the pits on February mornings, no doubt. But there are few higher notes than your bare back and your long braid in the glow of the Jotul after a sponge off on some viciously cold howling midwinter night. The speckled washbasin. The drowsy heat. Your spine, vertebrae like an ancient fossil, a bird or dinosaur, a skeleton that goes way back to the origins of the world. The shadows and the cracks and hisses and pops and the scurrying mice. Your pregnant belly glowing and the Jotul hungry for more and me ready and waiting with an armload. The house a shell on its way to a home and the land a home holding the shell on its way. You toweling off and you humming Pachelbel. You saying thanks, I’m beat, lets hit the hay buckaroo, caballero, my love.

Kevin Chesser

Beautiful World

I visited the grave of a famous poet, one who hadn’t been dead for very long. It was a clear summer day, hot enough to cause swells of discomfort, occasional black sails of weird memory. As I got down on my knees to take a rubbing of the stone, there were sounds in the trees around me, like little crackling radio broadcasts. I felt like I had signed up for the visit-the-grave-of-a-dead-poet deluxe package. Somewhere in the static I heard a commercial, because what is poetry if not a message from our sponsors. The commercial was for lithium batteries, now with a bitter coating to discourage children from swallowing them. I took this as a warning - it will be harder, in the future, for our children to find the energy to keep going. On the drive home, I listened to Coldplay—we live in a beautiful world.

Ragtime Memories

I was a ragtime piano player in an old time saloon. I played with tyranny, accuracy, and ether. My joie de vivre was measurable, like humidity. I kept a rabbit under my hat to hold life close. During my hours long sets the rabbit would enter a state of meditation, and I’d think its thoughts. The entire town was made of dust. To go for a walk was to be blinded and enchanted. Saloon workers such as myself could purchase an hour with a woman at a seven percent discount. The one I loved most was named Rita. She caught consumption from studying the gilded edge of everything. The world in those days was simple, like a breath of hell. Many flashing lights since then. Not me, gazing up at time’s mesa, the flat rock of dreams. The black piano buffalo in the corner.

Dirt Crawler Navy

It was during a summer of fine weather, rivers, blossoms, stars, and frogs, the whole world broken into haiku, that I had a terrible argument with my father and was sent to join the Dirt Crawler Navy. I would go to boot camp and spend the duration of my service time helping drag a massive ship across dry land. This was in Iowa, but at nightfall the corn would disappear and turn to desert, and we’d fall asleep singing our favorite coyote songs. Instead of shore leave we took pond leave. Each of us in our turn would row a little boat out to the middle of a pond, where we would eat sandwiches and drink beer and wave to the pretty ladies standing on the shore. But if you rowed too close to them, they would disappear, like a trick of the light. The ship we were dragging was in fact called the La Luz, though all I really remember about it is its shadow.

A.N. Grace

apple pie

no nice things, not when you're laid up and the sun arcs fruitlessly the shuttered blinds, no nice things, not when the bed's unmade and the thick-pile carpet inches you away, softly, gently, no nice things, not when you turn up the heat and the promise of nostalgia is just a sour, crumbly, mess

Jeff Friedman & Meg Pokrass

The Egyptians on Sappho Avenue

After we moved to the rental on Sappho Avenue, Mom claimed she made jewelry for Egyptian Pharaohs. She would come home every evening smelling like the Nile. Her long black hair shone in the weakly lit kitchen. “Mom,” I said, “Where did you meet Egyptian Pharaohs and how do you know they’re Pharaohs?” She stood near a bowl of tangerines that seemed to be mummifying. “Don’t eat those,” she said. “They’re for appearances.” She reminded me of Cleopatra, only older, with a motherly pot belly and slouch. She always wore sheer dresses and a turquoise necklace that might have been bright blue glass. My father, whom she nicknamed Alexander the Not-So-Great, had gone off on a long sales crusade in the Far East and never returned. “Mom, I really want to know why you think your customers are Pharaohs?” “Ptolemy,” she said, “You ask too many questions. They’re fat men in fezzes with lovely ladies on their arms. Who else would they be?” She dangled her bracelets and started one of her infamous belly dances that made her look as though she was being swallowed by a snake. The moon rose higher over the pyramids of Sappho Avenue, and soon because there was nothing more to say, I was rolling my belly too.

Connor Fisher

Death in the Theater

I will die in the theater. I will pass away as an actor, as an actor passes away when playing a character who has died. The character I portray will be myself, acting out death as I inhabit my own death. I have been cast as Hamlet. I have been cast as Willy Loman and Macbeth. I will die in a staged car wreck; I will die by poison or by my own hand. I will embody my role more completely than has been thought possible in the history of the theater. Performing the Scottish play, I will allow the actor playing Macduff to remove my head from my neck at the play’s climax. The prop sword usually used for the act of mock-decapitation will be substituted for a genuine sword; the proxy blade will execute its portrayal of a genuine sword with sublimity. My decapitated head will portray itself flawlessly, luxuriating in its disembodiment, a liberated state. My headless body will play its own part, the part of a lifeless body. No other body could play this part. No other body could mimic the way mine will fall to the floor, lifelessly. No other stump of a neck could imitate the way that mine will portray blood rushing out in surges of arterial spray. Only in the theater can I attain a death that is at once itself and an imitation of itself; in dying, I will raise the perfect mask of death.

Benjamin Niespodziany

from Book of Dreams

[dream]

I crossed a mountain with a rotary phone so you could take calls from your grave. Who will you call, I asked, the cord stretching from heaven to grandma's cottage. You're dead. You laughed a rancid laugh. A raspy hacklung number. Speak for yourself, you said, dialing the phone and asking to be alone before turning away.

[dream]

When I do this, I see my left thumb has a cut. I peel it back and find a tiny door. I open the door and look inside the house, my thumb, this thumb house, where a school bell rings and a tiny thumb person steps out and announces an envelope. I try to open it but it is smaller than the door in my thumb, so the page fades. It is an impossibility. The tiny thumb person looks ruined. The tiny thumb person, the only soul who has seen me fail, I now have to destroy.

Logan Elizabeth Craig

Apogee

At the perigean spring tide, the Moon dips so close to earth she hears you beg to be her friend. Just friends, you assure her. Nothing more. Accustomed to prayer, she enchants you a flip phone. You text her all night long. She speaks to you only in couplets at a sonnet's end. I cannot name a night you haven't dreamed / beneath me though I fall and wane and bleed. And leave. When the sun breaks the horizon you race for proof she is still there: almanacs, tidal datums, horoscopes. Her phone number, a series of oscillating characters. Foreign to you but for the last four digits. 666, read your friends, but they miss one: 6666, alphanumeric for MOON. They suspect it a vanity number. They say she is leading you on. She gives you time in crescents, in fingernail clippings. Do you even know her name? That night, she texts you GRACE, a pearl in the mollusk of your flip phone, and then goes dark. You beg for more to silence. Collapse and sleep til noon. Your friends don’t believe it’s her, even when you wake in a blanket of dust. You wash off in the ocean, let the waves kiss as high as your knees. Pretend that it's her. Shivering, you search for her contact: her name an empty space, a blurry image of the midnight sky, her light blocking out all the rest. ♦