Miasma
by Mark Olival Bartley
The End of Drought
by Amy Kinder Moore
My brother sees the saguaros on the horizon,
backlit by lightning. One thousand of them
watching his car in the dark. They follow him
until his death a couple miles down the road.
This is something the whole family expected.
My dad gets there first, sits in the rain
until the sun arrives in a grey veil, lighting up
my brother’s red remnants. Then my mom,
my sister, me. My dad shows us what to do:
how to roll up the intestine, wrapping it neatly
around an open palm. Where to look
for the long splinters of the left femur.
How to track the day’s progress
by the light reflection in my brother’s eye.
What to say when we wrap all his pieces in green cloth
and take them out to the saguaros on the hill.
How to put him in their arms, let them take him,
plant him with their children before the next day begins.
Things Harvested
by Amy Kinder Moore
Dean out in the back field, silent.
His hands stained dark
from picking the last plums.
He and I watch autumn end –
birches leaning forward
in the pale wind. Daylight splintering.
The stiff bodies of little birds
piling up in the stream.
When the first snow comes,
we go into the woods
and dig a deep grave for everything
that was once bountiful:
the sick mush of old pears;
a dandelion, stripped naked;
our wet bed sheets, cold to the touch;
my tongue; his hands; the rest
of our bodies, crawling into the earth
together, growing hostile as the soil.
The Blue Hours
by Amy Kinder Moore
Blueberries in the dark. An ice-cold washcloth
winding around a blue wrist. A knife moving down
into white fish – how it makes little snowy cliffs
in the body. Me, waiting for Dean in his room.
The solitary window glistening with black rain.
Nightfall. Water whispering down the street
in one crystal sheet. Ways to survive the waiting:
a razor moving through my hair. Hair falling.
All the strangled hours walking through,
carrying nothing. Frost growing
up Dean’s side of the bed, enveloping his pillow.
I know I have been abandoned.
I put the knowing in my own mouth like a fruit.
Keep it tucked in my cheek for later.
Drown Out
by Bernadette McComish
I catch your breath with my lips
the atmosphere awash with smoke.
A child from the future sings
Lord, I take refuge in your purgatory radio.
Awash with smoke, the atmosphere
makes visions cloud. A drunken fortuneteller
hears your refugee voice on purgatory radio—
garbled announcements like underwater news.
My vision clouds. I pay the fortuneteller,
ask her why my heart line is braided—
scrambled wavy lines like music underwater,
she says I should watch how I spend money.
Though the lines of my heart are braided,
she sings of my future children.
Later you say I should watch my spending.
I catch my breath; bite my lips.
MonsterS
by Abigail Sayre
The furthest depths of our oceans
hold the monsters I met as a child
alone in my bedroom turning pages
like curtains at a carnival
I studied them, the creatures of the deep
my brain made nightmares out of neon eyes
electric skeletons and see-through skin
at night I watched them glow behind my eyelids
I have not given up making science into catastrophe
alone in my room I wonder
will I float among the monsters too
watching ashes scatter and sea levels rise
I imagine locking eyes with an angler fish
off the shores of the city where we once lived
where we made our homes
where we watched the war on television
harmless creature formed
from the same matter as my worried mind
and below we bathe together in salt and darkness
Caldera
by Laura Shovan
Once, my mouth was a crater.
Words erupted from that core
of heat, the deep place.
Over time, my lips collapsed
and stilled. People told stories
about my origins.
Their tales filled me entirely,
edge to edge, until I looked as pure
as a mountain lake.
I would like to send a cinder
to the surface, one hot word
bubbling, rising until it breaks the blue
window of water above me
and scorches the lips of someone
drinking at the crater’s edge.
HOLD
by Allya Yourish
When the bucket floods, the water will be fresh and sweet and overflowing. You will bail out the bucket with another bucket, until your bailing bucket fills with water so salty that it crystalizes on your fingers. You will take your salt crystal fingers and run them over your cheeks, which will be wet from freshwater tears. And your salt crystal fingers will dissolve against your freshwater tears and will burn tracks that look like canyons. And the canyons will be deep and they will be red, and at their bottom will be a family that looks like your family but isn’t. The family will be white water rafting. This will remind you of your family because your family used to go white water rafting in the summertime, but it is not your family because your family is at home today. And the family’s boat will spring a leak and they will bail the leaking boat out with a bucket until the bucket overflows.
3am When You Can Hear The Planes
by Nate Maxson
A brief cold front, sharp, a boot on my breath, a momentary fragment of the August night piercing me like glass
Like a séance, the waves of a dead moment lapping, you ask the spirit what it sees and where it’s going
Or a waking dream: a truck is parked outside my window, red lights and men talking low
A gilded pain in the side, this black machine, the year of the bluebird, big ones digging into the dirt with their wings
Inside the invisible drum/heart, the pulse, military jets overhead generating wind and roar
Like the archaeologists’ hands someday picking through the bricks, and specked eggshells on my mound, the sound encroaches, ghostlike and named against the sky
One More Fathom To The Hungerstone
by Nate Maxson
What you can see in the sky on a clear day
What we could see but don’t
In the water backwards, an Ophelia pose
Moonlike daylight apparition
A constellation shaped like Gorbachev’s birthmark
And the ghost of the tallest waterslide ever constructed,
Torn down after the death of a child
Shuffle these signs like a three-card monte and see what happens
Oracle marks carved like teethings on turtle shells,
Set upside down to float down the river with candles that quickly burn out
Here is the ritual over your eyes like a veil
Event horizon,
How we know the world is round even when the object disappears
Seven Frames of the Ouija Board, Moving Through Unknown Means
by Nate Maxson
1
A convergence: the Ouija board was first introduced to American audiences in 1890 as a parlor game (the planchette) and only later when our prewar spiritualist fever was peaking did we reassociate it with Séance, speech with the dead/ the unknown voice becoming known, roll the film we’ve got a few more minutes to kill, and similarly the “inventor” of it now listed as the man who filed the patent, one Elija Bond despite spirit boards having been in use around the world for hundreds of years beforehand, a new meaning to the phrase “invisible hand of the free market”
2
(here: an incomplete countdown on a screen in scratchy grayed sepia, 5,4,3…) it’s a documentary hosted by Carl Sagan and shown in a classroom sometime late last century (2,1-) we have to consider what comes out of the void, it’s like this: what we make stays, out of words even more so, a spaceship emerging from a black hole, birthed from the was/ panoramic at-onceness how does a memory made of spirit without body except in sacrifice, begin? No such thing as without body only in ignoring the smoke, the warning signs, the check engine light, it’s just the wind, the wind and the watch, wound up in starstuff and dowsing rod iron
2
If we move into mythology, allow me a digression: the Aztec goddess Ixtab? The Spanish conquistadores may have invented her: wreathed in candy skulls, a Kali for the western hemisphere, perfect for projecting one’s death cult like a filmstrip and a lightbulb and yet there may be a link between Her, snake tamed and charnel lipped; and modern notions of Santa Muerte (crept among the wastes) but the difference between a memory and a false memory grows smaller daily so who’s to say whose death cult exists and whose is only just being born
3
If the ghost reveals itself as the childmind now possessed by you: reciting nursery rhymes and scratching on the walls starlight starbright where the river begins, we still aren’t sure/ but you who wear the skin of your past and move the glass, knock on the table precisely eight times and I will offer you a reveal, the death of a mystery (the ideomotor effect) if you must know
4
How does the hand of a disembodied voice move? How does a clock? How does a river? How does a dream
5
Begin with motion, continue into perpetuality, and then onwards into frivolous contraption
6
Not so different from a Geiger counter, needle twitching and a backing-up beeping noise: machinery detecting mystery/ the fortune teller’s invisible hands, but how many fingers am I holding up? All of them if you don’t count my thumbs, an incomplete arcana: each one a telegram stuttered into quantity but that’s the difference between us and the animals, between the sobriety test and breath
7
What are we measuring? What coded patent? What unsteady brass diving suit hosed to the sky and hoping for a perfect vacuum, to keep the water out, we must drink ever so, deeply
Faceless
by Sujash Purna
imagination is more powerful
than the verses of the spirits
that saw more than they saw
you shirking away from the light
lost and cursed they wait for the end of the world
when we all blend
images of lightning
the shiver on your skin
s l i v e r s
there’s nothing to be afraid
the empty space clearing out
then
Clutters,clutterstartarusclutters,tartarusclutters, and clutters,
a slob in a room for a clearing
a barnhouse of old artefacts with a face in a face of a face
in a face of a face as if just faceless
standing by the window
ready to fly into a night,
before daylight arrives
these spirits go away, home to their folks
You wonder what they eat, light?
Or a tarpaulin, monolithic, night blind god’s wisdom to taunt
a mankind as clueless as they were on the day
of the dead when we all woke up? we see you
and you don’t see us? write this
when I am dead, lurking around you with you unawares
I still exist, but you tell sometimes when I go inside your
dreams with no face at all, just a palpable nerve prickling
on a full moon like a mirrored door.
You see me now
, waiting for Gabriel’s horn to go off,
faceless
but for a left eye and a dead nose and a wrinkle for a mouth
Rumor Painted Full of Tongues
by Geoffrey O’Brien
“upon my tongues continual slanders ride”
There is no nice way to say this but we already decided
to stop listening to any of them, because they organized a conspiracy
against pillowcases and stitched aerials into our camping gear,
until even the shortest path to the machine shed
festers with toxic droppings. Where did the birds go.
Windowpanes have been banned. There will be no more ice treats.
Everything is a lie, even the word “lie”, even the word “even”.
In an emergency the first thing to fill out is a checklist
of missing items, trophies, parking spaces, weather alerts,
personalized keychains, things with your name written all over them.
Nobody wants you to know how long this has been going on.
(Hint: since before you had ears.) Your birthplace
had by then been farmed out to freelance coin collectors
and self-proclaimed fact-checkers. Barbarism has deep roots.
Neither civilizations nor planets are quite what they seem.
Money is in cages. Flat things are made to appear curved.
A hole is being dug right now under the street,
which is to say under the feet you have a right to stand on
in your own doorway, a right both unconditional
and under permanent siege. What looks like a harmless canopy
dangling over the entrance to a midtown high rise
is so often a signal visible to offshore interlopers
who are declaring in so many words you are incapable
of reading what is put in front of you. I didn’t want to be the one
to say this but someone has to acknowledge that silence
can be deliberately manipulated. Think about caverns.
Think about locker rooms. Think about drinking fountains.
If that is too hard think about what is happening
in back of your head whenever you step outside.
It is not a picture anyone wants to look at
for any longer than it takes to recognize the fellow
at the rear of the subway car, the grizzled guy
with thick glasses and a neighborhood accent
who is about to tell you how things are
and you can already hear it in his eyes.
Sequestration
by Geoffrey O’Brien
What is there to work with
but the sound of other voices.
The later you come to a place
the more quickly it fills with absences.
In his late compendium
“The Decline of the Real”
he had written: “History has room
only for the inconceivable.”
A nostalgia for the world.
The lotus pond
not yet drained.
The air they lived on.
What will you take
to the hills if you can get there,
if in the heat
they have not already lost their minds.
Fated even now to listen for Andromeda
pleading from a distant rock.
Mixed with the groans of the emaciated
from an unlit sub-basement.
A ghost rider crying for a wildflower.
Need some amino acid,
some glycine and phosphorus
or nothing will happen.
Violence is a language
like any other
except it only tells you
what you don’t want to hear.
It Was Written
by Michele Mekel
It blew pungent—the kind of squall that caused a shiver to rise and
compelled your great aunt to put down her teacup with a slow shake the head,
knowing in those octogenarian bones nothing good could come of this change in the weather.
It birthed dust devils that played tag among mossy tombstones
in the long-neglected cemetery at the end of the weedy lane,
where restless ancestors mourned their kith’s failure to pay proper homage.
Making its way down the main drag of town and through the best neighborhoods,
it rattled iron gates and clapboard shutters alike,
as weathervanes spun wildly in gusts seemingly devoid of identifiable direction.
While dogs whined and barked at an invisible intruder,
the author laid down her pen and let the ink dry,
allowing the dark tempest to ravage her world a bit longer.
Afterlife Still Life
by Louis Zieja
a tarnished bowl filled with dotted
outlines of devoured apples,
an antique vase filled with familiar
faces frowning,
a used condom covered with
Easter grass,
all precisely placed on
a mahogany table draped
in ectoplasm, all more static
than static and clumsily
framed forever.