elsewhere

C.C. Russell

An Apocalyptic Fairy Tale

The story was that there were more of them than there were of us. The story was that some of us had been weak, corrupted. Someone had made a mistake. Love had been somehow twisted into something ugly between old friends. The story was that the balance had shifted, that the scales had been tipped towards darkness. Someone had been hiding their intentions against us. We had been poisoned from within, we had been blind to it. We had knowingly been blind to it. The story was that there had been spies in our midst for far longer than we suspected. Something had gone out, something viral, something that could not be put back. The story was that we had grown arrogant, foolish and that was to be our downfall. The story was that it was our last days. We didn't yet know that our narrative was coming to this violent close so soon, that the language was already moving against us. The story was growing insistently quiet. The story was plotting our demise. The story was beginning to build towards its own sort of violent climax. The story was whispering our names, one at a time. Our secrets out loud.

Seth Hagen

Us versus Them

We return unpicketed from the skirmish. They grind paintings. They line the eyes of barons with kohl. We claw bark. We worry hangnails. We purchase a highly-rated grip strengthener. Each morning, it is as though we had made love with ghosts. We feel eggshells hardening inside. They deal in feathers. They call bees a hoax. They land planes, they land helicopters and rockets. We are sparrowed and cowed. We write poems. They rewrite tomorrow. They use all caps and AI. The coffeepot cools. The toaster shines. We serve them toast, lightly toasted. The butter is Land O'Lakes. They put us on trial. They give us five bullets. They give us a while.

The History of Poetry

A noble band of men and women somewhat intoxicated throw fire among the dry goods. A lackey fetches a pail of cider for the parson, divine with the death of apples. Evening. Cows foddered. An ax rests at the root of a fruitless tree. A pinprick in the palm, a minute pool of blood, a great weltering of minuteness. Centuries. Citherns and couplets. Corsets and tercets. An outbreak of empty pastures haunted by empty futures. Heroically, a horse enters the field, dangerously out of focus, speaking horsetalk. Clip clop. Smoke. Click clack. Also smoke, but ether, metros, fascists, and screens. An inquisition of punctuation. Lateness comes to a bedroom community, a lover rises from her lover. She opens her window, lies back in bed, listens to the mower cut the grass. In the slow doppler of its drone, she hears the procession, the recession of a tide of bees. A great weltering of minuteness.

Lena Kinder

One of Those Dead

Some of us tie ourselves down. We link our atoms to headstones like an anchor or lock ourselves in the places we died. Some are carried by the living. We wrap ourselves around warm bodies and make-believe that we are alive again. Some of us detach and become air. We are breathed in and out from lung to lung, until we find a cloud watcher or a star gazer who pushes us up and out of the atmosphere. I am one of those dead, freefalling in reverse. I am watching the ground get smaller and smaller, the Earth a pinpoint.

Meg Pokrass

Stolen

Applying stolen make up to my invisible features was a way to speed things up. I could draw myself happy. Underline my eyes, scurrying around with an azure eye pencil, rushing home to try a new face on. I patted my mother's foundation makeup all over my freckled cheeks. Suddenly a different girl, presto change-o, as if leaping from a long hard sleep. I stared at my legs so babyish it felt like a joke. Calm down, I said to the polliwog in the mirror. Nothing happens quickly. There was a crone who lived in my head, told me that running away from childhood would do me no good. Just wait til you wake up with brittle knees, she rasped, and I listened. Still, I kept up with the stolen makeup. One day I was a sloth, the next day a butterfly. One day a snail, the next day a jackrabbit, whooshing past.

Eric Pankey

Of The Epic One Recalls a Passage

The loom's rhythm lulls the suitors to sleep. One prefers the perfected proportions of nostalgia, the permanence of objects over object permanence. One is comforted by how the accident recurs until flawless. Not an accident at all. Of the vast, one knows fragments; of the epic, one recalls a passage through a swamp, an abandoned drawer used as a makeshift crib. One proceeds not by way of divination, but a to-do list. In the distance, a stark architecture of sunlit beehives, fallow fields sown with land mines. Autumn: an old dog gnaws at burrs. Hours pass but who recalls the backfilling of each minute?

Rebecca Valley

I try to give myself the february I always wanted

Everyone in our town is surprised by the snow. It weighs almost nothing. I walk to the thrift store to look at old clothes. The women behind the counter talk about how our bodies didn't evolve to read the news. One woman says: I've been told my whole life that there will be one thing I'm better at than anyone else. But I still don't know what it is. The other woman changes the subject.

It turns out if you write a fantasy of the day, it's all you'll remember. I try to write a poem about the arrangement of objects in a room. I try to write a poem about the perfect February. I write and write but the pages are empty. Oh well. I eat a bowl of cereal. Go for a walk to watch the men at the corner pumping their gas. There are so many things I can purchase to make myself feel like an artist! This desk, these pants, this experimental online residency.

The curtain falls down to reveal a bright morning. Here you are, finally. I give up being lonely and make us both pancakes. We watch a show about real people who agree to marry strangers. We love to watch relationships fail from a great distance. Meanwhile, an old man snow-blows the sidewalk at the church across the street. Every Sunday, one of our neighbors drops his mother off for the sermon. He waits in his car for an hour, sipping gas station coffee and playing Bejeweled.

These days it's easy to be afraid, and sometimes we are — looking at birds and seeing a world without birds. Looking, looking, and everywhere we see things that cost too much. Someday, I think, there will be less work and more play. There will be fields of time unoccupied by labor. We watch a show where designers make clothing so enormous, no one could possibly wear it. One day, I will dress myself in possibility. Pull a hole over my head and ease into a brand-new world.

Poetry is a witness to loneliness. Someone I know is having a baby and someone else is refinishing their kitchen cabinets. And of course we want the person with the most horrifying life to win the extravagant prize!

The freedom of poetry is breaking the line. But I'm not breaking anything. I am trying to build a life for us. I mean here, inside this poem. ♦