Archive
Approaching the Nuclear Facility
The vase is thrown
with greyish clay, sculpted
to stack like bracelets
laid to cinch near the middle.
Livestock graze the grass.
Clover sprouts unbothered.
From the hilltop, the bracelets form
the elongated neck of a Ndebele—
foreign, disembodied
in the pasture’s lap,
facing who knows
which direction.
Tree
Limited edition digital print
Image 9 1/4″ x 10 1/2 “; paper 11″ x 14”
(Click on image to view at larger size.)
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End Times
The silo, empty, has
shifted toward its
obsolescence.
Built like a barrel,
it rots like one:
mold-softened planks
dissolving, wood & iron—
now just rust—
meld and powder and at last
subside. Termites
and carpenter bees
dismantle the rest.
It once held grain enough
to feed a herd of cattle
gone, no lowing sounds
along the muddy creek
where the silo stood
full, upright
as a carillon tower,
a hymn of silage
amid mown fields.
What is contained
when the container’s
abandoned? Something
that pulls
the structure
over, the specific gravity
of absence
the hollow meaning
of after.
the deepest part
Diving into the deepest part and
even looking at it on a map.
Its dark blue stillness commands a
respect. Like a Dietrich or a
Marlow.
It lures you by its
perhaps danger, you take a swallow
loud like thunder.
A universe, not littered by stars,
smooth, clean.
Its amethystine reaches call—
soundless echoes, vibrations
no lungs can make.
This must be the distant song
of sirens shielded by its opaque depth.
Tristful moans that lure me
out of bed some nights.
Whales on a beach
so appear tramontane
and epic—
no longer royal—but
deflated blue-grey sacks on colorless sand,
that our hands fast push back
towards the deeper part—those ultramarine pools—
They prepare a faint.
by e. moya
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The Creature
Friday morning, rush hour traffic and suddenly from within the tight curl of the I-94 cloverleaf there arose something first manifest through scent (like blood and apricots) then color (olive green with russet edges). Of course it was more beautiful and loathsome than us. Stupid in ways we don’t allow ourselves to be stupid, brilliant in ways that escape us. But I only learned this later, after the scooping up and dumping onto, after the lair visit and deep conversation, after my betrayal, after the show. At that moment all I knew was relief that something so big had happened without anyone stopping it. When people ask me what I remember most, I tell them about the nature of its skin: moist yet healthy, covered with scales that seemed to imply imperviousness yet failed in the end, as we all know. And I mention the tenderness because that’s part of the last promise I made myself, even as I pointed the chopper towards its home. I am not speaking of the creature’s tenderness, for that is well documented. I mean my own, the way my time with him softened the concrete house of my heart.
by Alice George
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A Preemptive Elegy
for M.L.
When the acres go away they will forget their farmers. They will lean, woven with soil, into damp patches of morning, quilting a settlement of gift-swollen seeds.
When you go away I hope I will inherit your rake which dreams of asparagus. You might, by then, be an overflowing, a soup stain on a tablecloth.
You might be burrowed, lettuce-like, into the fields of so many nights.
You might be sulfur-broken wings wrinkled against the horizon while I navigate a bitter maze of patient hands, raking a patchwork of dirt.
Original soundtrack by Failboat – Download the MP3
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Extinction
You were the only member:
not quite domain, a hungry sect
my species. Now, a lone
attenuated form
vestigial remnant
like gar in flooded quarry pit
or possum, wire-hanger tail
and anxious crunch of kit’s
dry meal from set-out pail—
how must I mourn?
My problems are too many teeth:
they seem unduly dull
Or vegetation’s plot, perhaps—
a shift in serration
evading failure’s dentation,
the way the world mutates
beyond peripheries of sight
Do I adapt?
If so, what tune
should I now whistle—
at crepuscule, noon—
through what constructed beak
and — Lord — to whom?
by Julia Martin
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High Water
West of here, an incursion, a storm surge:
the breakwaters give way.
East of here, levees burst in an unseasonable torrent.
The tarns of the Tetons decant their icemelt
into this basin of ours,
this gold chalice of once-habitable land.
Convergence: Deluge.
Eloi, eloi, the heartland has gone missing,
and the tribe of the Gros Ventre.
I am water-brought.
I float up to the cathedral ceiling
toward a last lungful of air.
Where is the animal who feels no fear?
Going under, I hear buffalo bellowing,
owls who’ing at noon.
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Home Depot Construction Site
West Lebanon, New Hampshire
(Click on image to view at larger size.)
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qarrtsiluni 