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.

Dreaming in Red, Awake

Kelsey Dean

at grandmother’s house, watching
sliced-open figs
 plump, ooze fertile seeds and sugar

self-medicating: sage   parsley ginger
boiled, burning, taste of root-flesh tattooed
 along esophagus, abdominal knots
shifting shape, kaleidoscope, always
heavy,   bright pomegranates

their husks nothing but fists
 filled with blood   the figs
placentas undone, the cats clawing
the trash bags
 screaming in the night

Nowheresville

Howie Good

1
An elderly man croons “It’s Raining Today,” a prophecy from a religion that never was. Nine out of 10 American children turn into geometric shapes. It became common after appliances misbehaved with deadly results. In a drab city, the sale and purchase of emotions are strictly regulated, but not everyone follows the rules. A gangster has himself gilded in gold. Flowers rise up against their oppressors. I make a fairly successful attempt to recreate a LSD trip, beginning with a blow to the face.

2
This is what I see when I get home, monstrous miserable flesh, a mumbling blue cow, the first sentence of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” I try to work on myself but am constantly interrupted by cigar-smoking angels who have had too much coffee. They argue over the necessity of burning the museums, shoot pink waves of light from their fingertips. It’s impossible to silence them. Self-doubt pokes through my normal façade. The small hours are the worst. I take the fact that the cow has run off to the woods surprisingly hard.

While Outside Montpelier, November 13, 2015

Jennifer Martelli

I bought hanging stars made of sticks and twigs, painted pewter and gun-
metal with red ribbons to hang on my tree. Silver antlers the size

of my thumb, small enough for a Gaulish god, and gold deer too,
antlered animals: stags, fawns (budding), elk. When I got back to the inn,

I heard those strange Parisian police sirens on the tv. My room thick
with pine pitch and fire and something burning: a sweet offering of meat.

Three Thin Shadows

Matt Dennison

Once you sell your horses
you’re never the same.

That’s not necessarily true,
just an attempt to say

the unsayable as loud
as the wounded frog

roaring across the valley
from a roadside ditch.

Family Trees for Bastards

Michele Leavitt

1. Dead so long, you can see right through them. The branches fell first, then the crown, then the bark sloughed off like snakeskin, and the cores collapsed, leaving suggestions of strong columns spun upward in helix fashion. Below the shifting leaf litter and sand, roots entwine with limestone. What’s left has put on the pocked and scored look of karst, but a tree remains a tree.

2. Dead, but still intact, this one has some juice for chalk-white fungi spiraling around its trunk. Shelves for tree frogs, pale question marks, frilled platters for dolls.

3. Still alive, this one ripped the floor with it. New name: windthrow. Had something loosed its anchorage and prepared it to let go? A hole opens in the canopy, saplings stuck in the pole stage wake. The earth that ripped with the tree, once part of a forest floor, now named a tip-up mound.

4. Pine cone. Alone on the floor, waiting for a fire to free its seeds. So it can start over.

Stoned on Benadryl

Laurie Kolp

Alienation
standing heavy in the kitchen
before NASA liftoff,

then falling vertiginously
holding both hands

in retrospect, a slight exchange
of rubble and dust

through smoked glass
clots of dried shampoo,
writhing in view
of silver repute.

Dots detach.
Speech impediment: glottal 1.
Meltdown.

Is this normal?

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