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Rebecca Macijeski

How to Read

The alphabet is a lost cipher, crude loops and scratches struggling to sequence. Each cluster is a garden. Each cluster of clusters a clumsy narrative. Metamorphosis. You have to break down to be reborn. Understanding first requires wailing wordlessly into the void you come from. I’m not sure I believe caves and what they hold onto. They speak of a human past we can’t reach. Convenient. Science knows the generations who built us, but only as bits of evidence dangling from the stories they haunt. So I was a girl. So I dragged old bedsheets from the house then old branches from the yard and made camp. It was a poor structure but it was mine. The books came next. I barely had to bid them. Like birds, they already knew the way home. I held them in my hands through afternoons. Unsteady and alive. Fluttering. A migration. So I was a girl alone. So what. I was part of the flock. I had my own sky, my own speaking. In my mind was flower after flower. That was the story of me.

Marcus Silcock

Roundabout

Newly arrived in the new city, fleeing the bombs of the other country, they rounded the road at the roundabout. New job on the line, said father, waving his riding cap. Rounding the road at the roundabout, they all leaned into each other. We’re on the government waiting list, said mother, waving the papers. Rounding the road at the roundabout, the roundabouts filled with light pleasant quivers. It’s almost Christmas, said sister, digging coins from the back seat. Rounding the road at the roundabout, buttery sunsets, skeleton trees. Rounding the roundabout, sigh from deep in the belly, sometimes a groan.

Alex Carrigan

Angelic

My daughter became an angel today. I went to wake her up for school, but instead watched her ascension. I watched as the braids in her hair morphed into feathered wings. Each of the freckles across her nose opened to reveal a golden eye. Her head let go of her neck and began to float above her bed. What remained of her body broke down into glass rosary beads that spilled out onto the floor. Her girlish giggle was aided by a choir of additional voices: my baby brother, my favorite uncle, her paternal grandmother. The last thing I saw before everything went dark was a long purple tongue that came out of her mouth and ate the cross that hung above her bed. Despite the stinging in my eyes, I’m glad she’s in a better place.

Anneliz Marie Erese

the insistence of things

it is noon & i grieve for the sun. for that yellow giant as big as my heart. for its audacity to come near me. touch me. a burning hand waking me up in the middle of my sleep. tell me something about the visibility of bodies. how come i see my father at the altar after he passed. still watch him walk down the aisle at church. still cry at the sight of him wearing a white suit. still feel him holy. they didn’t bury him well. i see people at the highway of my dreams walking the border of here & there. no one cautions me against the insistence of things. against the way he sits with me on the pavement & then kisses me. the way this time he has a blue shirt on as clear as the ocean waist-deep. against the head that keeps looking back at me. against my head that keeps answering to the call. tell me where does this warmth go after the candle flame is snuffed out. what does God have to do with limbs. what if am not Eve but the snake. what do i know about my spirit but that i give each one of them away. here’s a silver light for you, my love. here’s one to you, my friend. here’s to you, my child self on the plane away from here. i give to you my endless resource, to the one who comes knocking back again & again. the sun is still the sun on a cloudy day. the dead body is still a dead body even walking outside its grave.

Matthew Jakubowski

Leave It

Goldie—come!—come, Goldie! Deer had been through, by starlight, or maybe an hour ago, their black splithooves had grabbed at the golden mud reddened and browned by the sun, their hoofprints a mix of colors churned together, the panic at being gripped by it in their flight, slurping at the whitetails’ legs like heavenly marrow being sucked hard from the bone. The deer take it on their hooves just as we take it asplash bootside or on a car ride, smudging it across the woods and roads, two legs or four, it’s impossible to miss the evidence of deer in country like this, it’s the same mud of local forensics, deer dying as hikers and drivers die amid the same golden mud blending with blood on a good dog’s snout. Goldie, come—hey—leave it, what did you find, girl? Oh my God, leave it! Goldie, no—

James Ducat

A Good Life Is a Trick

My father got sick and then he died. He was 92, so we say things like “He had a good life” and “He went the way he wanted to,” which is a rhetorical trick, because he didn’t want to die, or at the very least talking about death in the abstract didn’t matter when it showed up at the foot of his bed even if he was facing the St. Lawrence Seaway. It was night, so he couldn’t see the water, wouldn’t have known if a ship passed except by the slow progress of running lights across the bay window and the low hum of the huge propellers, but he had a bay window and he had hands to hold and why is it not enough whether the orange tabby disappeared that night. It came back. The scotch we drank after his burial was the same bottle he got as a gift for his wife’s memorial. O father, O softness. “Well, fuck,” is what he said very near the end, as a laker rumbled by, carving forward, leaving nothing but wake. ♦