Archives for June 2016

The Downed

Becca Borawski Jenkins

The three of them stood in the field and stared at the cow lying in the grass. Her husband had told her not to look. The old man had concurred. But the old man had shot the cow, so he was not to be trusted.

“My wife is inside and she’s dying,” the old man said.

“That’s not the cow’s fault,” she said.

“It was either me or the cow,” the old man replied.

The cow’s head jerked with a snort. Blood sprayed from its nose onto her husband’s pants.

She waited for her husband to react, but he didn’t.

from Notebook: New Mexico

Tom Montag

Along I-25, Heading for Santa Fe

What the mountains
offer

where there’s nothing
you want?

In this faltering light,
the light.

Robot #18 (meal plan)

Jennifer MacBain-Stephens

The robot attempts to prepare a romantic dinner. He folds napkins like a Russian chess player: confident, stony-faced, and precise. But the courses are somewhat of an internet cliché. The salad is first. Then a bisque. Then a roast chicken. Then German chocolate cake (the German threw him off for a bit, but he then realized it was just part of the name). It is worthy of any juvenile first attempt at romantic meal planning. But where is the personality, robot? Where is the danger?

Rain, the rumble of future rain

Gail Goepfert

—lines found in habry, Helen Degen Cohen

In the middle of the universe
 in its silent eye
 like a black pearl,
take a deep breath with me, and rest

in the deep forests of the earth
 wildflowers
silken blue, among orange poppies
 deep, deep in
and the silence blows.

Now her high time is over.
  Let her lines speak—

it was, really
 all the little days
 the things she saved alive
with such wildness
 a rose in her hand
 weightless and smiling

 humming & humming

Oh Lord, there is
 her poetry to lie on
 and wind, and wind and glisten
and harps
 writing shadows in the golden sky.

Lantern; orgasm. Silence.
 Later, perhaps, the holy moon.

De Profundis

James Reidel

A fresh mole tunnel has disturbed the grass. So the earth opens its veins to the sky and where the freemasons would think to pour forth, with their legions, their little martial poses and airs as red as the redcoats I would arrange around my bed swords high and muskets trained only to be smote with my pillow still wet with my face and tears. Time out!

I have a garden hoe now. I have a trap that I could see duct-taped to a broomstick and so brandish the double trident of some final and human dare. But the countermining along the north wall and the children’s bedrooms, which we like to think of as empty “guest rooms,” where all the radiators are closed to save on the heat, has surfaced into the pine bark bed and felled my forest of Echinacea, their stalks leaning this way and that, the purple pompoms and golden eyes that would delight my day like so many false buttons running up and down a birthday clown’s smock.

So I just walk around the house in a mope and tug at the curtains, the chinks in their material, the way I might have wanted that old clown to twist for me yet another deer, another dachshund, or my favorite, the little balloon sword. I named it Cling-clang and burst in front of the other children and parents, squeezing the blade up from the bottom, and on purpose.

So I am miserable in your eyes that travel from this page to the next, feather mites on the blackbird’s wing, who watch like gods flying, looking for some new and blacker forest.

The Child River (with Monkey Burn)

James Reidel

A walking stick, which taps the green footbridge, testing the first few boards, following a few bars of the brown notation all through the woods—the worried lunch bag paper of dead beech leaves, which hang on through the winter, and they provide the only rustle, the only greenery, so to speak, or where the color peeled off the picture, such that whatever is seen here is not painted with good linseed oil that lasts, or on cloth with a tight weave, more at kraft paper and half-dry finger paints, which are so thick and strong at first, that would resist and sometimes resist more than a little. There was some evidence for this, in the way her slim wrist gave across from me at the art table, as though from nowhere, as though her hand had been taken by a ghost that bled in those few colors. And suddenly I realize I have been twisting the wood rail of the bridge in two different directions, while thinking the water would be the blue, the banks the green, the stick trees the brown, and the gray dots for the stones or stations you must climb upstream, to where a swale meets it, a meadow of mostly wild strawberry. The earth still sparkles wet here, wherever prints fill with what will be a river eventually, the undertow, which nurses here, sucking on the deer’s hooves, the devil’s cattle.

Not glamor but Glamor

E. Kristin Anderson

Paper flowers hid flies,
props floating over the dust.

Bombs X’d the precise spot
between now and nails.

Still humming, night air
played from a vent in the wall.

And down, dust-marked, surprise
made lips reach to the ground.

Under the quiet spoil, all the glamor
(the odor of flowers) scooped wraiths:

soft, beautiful strangers.

Sunflowers

Carol Dorf

On the way to the grave, you wish for a mother. The Egyptians had Hathor with her deep-set eyes and high cheekbones. My mother keeps having problems reaching her mother on the phone, no matter how frequently we go over the dates. She wants someone to drive her there for a visit. Her father visited the cemetery on the day he died to say Kaddish for his parents. She doesn’t ask for that. When I told my teenager I feared dementia, she asked, “Do you want me to euthanize you?” Thank God rain is predicted, a promise to end the year’s drought. I told her, “No.”

Sunflowers in the vase, one with a red center.

CPR

Carol Dorf

The way one can bring another back to life—counting breaths and chest compressions—this fails more than it succeeds, leaving witnesses in a room full of hieroglyphs to decipher. At certain times we become so attuned to connotations, it is hard to understand the person across the table. A life of gestures distilled into a few sentences.

If the walls of the room filled with outlines of birds, no one would remark on their colors or even the turn of a wing.

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