Archive
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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oceans of straw
last night I dreamt
oceans of straw covered the world
men burrowing
with their noses and sifting
with their teeth
in hopes of finding the last matchstick
to taste we need to breathe
we need skin
there are weathermen
in the basement of basements
playing truth or dare
above them the straw
forever dry and delicate
as their teeth glow with thirst
they have swollen faces and they won’t give up
they won’t stop
pointing at the ceiling and saying
the chance of rain is better than ever
Reading and toy piano by the author, with banjo accompaniment by John Colburn
Download the MP3
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Such Imperfection
“…belief is the wound that knowledge heals…”
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Telling
A year since
falling
on my knees
to the earth
deer calling
across the dark
meadow. Brittle Queen
Anne’s Lace and late-
comer daisy — all
the dying grasses.
Orion hunts above
the ridge
where snatches
of conversation
from luxury
homes waft
down like dew
which is also
falling exactly
like the old
hymns say:
Balm of Heaven on Earth.
The mosquito whine
of traffic in all seasons
louder now the leaves
have begun their journey
to soil.
Drivers on Antioch and Barry
stare at billboards announcing
human dwellings for sale —
from the 250’s.
Fetal now
body and soul
posing a question
worthy of a sibyl:
Where, then, do we live?
Down by the creek
deer, impatient, but wary,
cough. From a hollow
in the meadow above us
an answer.
I must rise
and try to walk
another way.
by Christina Pacosz
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Response to an Invitation
The City is celebrating its 420th birthday with speeches, dancing, good Lithuanian food and alus (beer). The Vice Mayor has asked that all former residents be invited home on this special day.
Consider the spaces between trees.
This is how you get to the forest, where you dug down
until the ground got warm, fashioned a door
out of branches, leaves for disguise. You have to start
while the dirt’s still soft, make no sound—
only the thug-thug of the stolen shovel, its iron haft
biting the heel of your hand, lie down in dirt,
eat the brown slop of your Mother, Lithuanian soil.
If you go deep, you can survive the winter
to emerge later, moonstruck, under a shower
of night-blooming stars.
Meanwhile, there were the lakes.
Litvaks, even displaced, paint these lakes,
longing for Homeland. Blue lakes, serene, still.
All that gleaming water, looking for the world
as if there were nothing to be dredged up
in spite of these lifetimes of fear, words—
my flat ocean of tears. You ask
how long till I cease this weeping. I tell you,
Never is not long enough.
by Marjorie Stamm Rosenfeld
Once Upon a Timely Moment
Apprehensive, she pushed open the door to take a final look, to check the Earth as far as she could see, to measure, to see if the gods she held were less than perfect. This was her world. The terror she found was in the measurement, in the time she had spent exploring dividend possibilities, the market’s surge, a late movie thought more boisterous than life itself, someone’s divorce, chicanery and outright theft, and a rigged election all too soon winked at. It came at her, the swift thought: our feet are caught in place: we are sucked into loam and hardpan and left for all of this rock; we are locked up tighter than the grip of stable Earth’s 17-degree axis. Escape is not here, or atonement for us. She kept saying “we,” kept herself aligned in that rare and human confederacy. There was assessment and agreement not known about; at that moment, in one half-held breath, hoe in hand, eyes gone to marble, a gaunt Filipino suddenly apprehends a minor shift in the Earth’s crust. It is the awed way she would know a tilt at a pinball machine. Beyond him, her, momentous Krakatoa, an island yet, proves to be imaginative again at the foot of history, and is no longer breathless. And deeper yet, farther away, thought to be buried out there in the fluffed accountabilities of Time, one long horse-tailed, red-eyed, incommutable comet picks up a little bit of left hand English… just for the hell of it.
by Tom Sheehan
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qarrtsiluni 