issue 6.0
Night Lenny
By Kenneth Pobo
​
Tonight ghosts get
playful, sneak up
from behind to ask you
for a date. You say Boo
and they disappear.
​
Your childhood drives by in
a red Mustang convertible,
whisks you away
to the school where you
died a terrible death
diagramming sentences.
Adjectives and adverbs
fought it out on separate lines.
​
You have that dream
again. You’re a lake
speaking through perch,
knowing you’ll evaporate
in a few minutes.
Three Passages
By Laurie Koensgen
​​
Your avatar
is a heart moth caught
in the amber of your grieving.
¶
​
Your knife slices
mushrooms into pilcrows.
New paragraphs, old leavings.
​
¶
​
A caul of frost
has cost the passionflowers
but you feel their tendrils breathing.
The Passion of Generations
By Judith Skillman
​
Bloodless, finally asleep,
my mother still teaches
her lessons beneath soil
topped with sap and needles.
Autumn whispers between trees,
numbers compete with years,
greed occupies countries full of foxes
and hares. How empty, our wombs,
and still, we are full of one
another. Do you see,
can you imagine the weight
in this time of lies and levies,
to be born with the cord
wrapped around your neck?
Bloodless, finally asleep,
my mother’s eternal optimism
is tempered by the coming of winter.
I am roadkill, stuck in my hard shell
By Sarah Watkins​
​​
because Olivia was speaking right to you on the radio,
and so was the billboard telling you to turn right,
​
your everyday oracles like compasses
pointing you back to true north—to brown shag hair and a northern accent
​
and calloused fingers vinegar-scented from the old guitar strings,
your star-crossed lover beneath those big city lights
​
where you can’t even see the night sky—so there you went,
ninety in a sixty-five, hitting me as you left—
​
and here I am in rigor mortis,
the breath of butterfly weed trapped in my lungs,
​
my hands folded at my chest with my half-picked dollar store manicure
I smudged sitting on your dorm room floor.
​
I never meant to make you choose,
but armadillo teeth don’t let go easily.
My Farmer
By Cole McInerney
​“pacing through the rain
among his blank fields”
– William Carlos Williams
​
In the blue room
on a March morning
standing at the window
watching the winter recede,
making a plan to go join him
figuring out the field
after porridge in the kitchen,
blueberries balanced on its slope.
Slow cats from the barn
slip through the open door,
one named Tuesday’s Boots
bumps me on his way by.
Out the kitchen window
past the gravel driveway
my farmer is in a blue work suit
surveying the soy crop soil.
He knows about crop calendars
and chicken coop netting, knows
how to use each machine
and asks me if I can name them––
I don’t know if I should assign them
new names or try recalling the ones
they came with, the field looking like
a flattened prairie, like a place to put up
the white billboards of a drive-in theatre.
When I’m at my farmer’s hospital bedside
he will tell me about a movie playing
in his head––I’ll be able to picture it
playing on those screens in the field
but won’t be able to name it,
two movie cowboys there
with silver stars over their hearts
up against a wide blue sky––
all of those skies turning the field
into a foreground.
global sludge
By Ari Zimmerman
​​
i was thirteen when the mud arrived
quietly in the sweet dark,
smelling of sulfur and radiators, crawling
slowly over backyards and parking lots,
peeking under my window and
swallowing everything
it touched
til it grew teeth, curling claws,
a long tangled tail
from our bike chains and broken porcelain
trying to become one of us
like a dog
rolling in our smell
to get rid of its own (yours)
the baby next door
bloomed with blisters¹
small worlds growing on his skin
bubbling and crying thick urine
but i didn’t know—
let it seep through my toes
and under fingernails
i knew its claws would fetch silver
its canines a coat
to rub my own smell on
​
¹ From “Global Sludge Ends in Tragedy for Ivory Coast” by Lydia Polgreen and Marlise Simons for The New York Times : “Over the next few days, the skin of his 6-month-old son, Salam, bloomed with blisters, which burst into weeping sores all over his body."
Bone Soup
By Petra Wenzel
​
I found the bones in that little forested spot behind the school. The one on Elgin Street that has a creek running through it.
They don’t let the kids play in the forest. I know because I’ve got a friend who used to go there when she was small. She told me it was strictly, absolutely, definitively off-limits, so much so that teachers would line the boundary at recess to ensure no child strayed into the shadows. So, like all forbidden things, it became dark and alluring. It was haunted. It was dangerous. It was teeming with horrible things. The dappling patterns of sun, punctured and torn by the canopy, camouflaged creatures of dim corners. The yellow-green mosses of rocks and felled trees were infecting. It devoured. The rustle of leaves. The whisper of a ghostly breeze. It was not cut and cleaned and monitored. It was wild.
There was, of course, nothing to be scared of in the little forest. Not even those old bones.
When I found them, they’d already been picked clean. No flesh, no fur or hair, not even any bugs left still licking at the remnants of whatever it once was. They were as bare and smooth as stones.
Just off the trail were the leftovers of other path-forgoers. Bits of wrappers, cigarettes smoked only halfway, beer cans crushed and empty. Evidence of people old enough to have the courage to stray into something they’d been warned against, but young enough to have to do so shrouded by the forested lot. I had to walk past these spheres of adolescence to find the bones.
Seeing a skeleton like that, small, unburied, and pale against the muddied earth, reminds you that the wild breathes its strong, slow breaths still, even when there are suburbs and cities and schoolyard lawns. Things are still growing and dying and eating each other.
It was nearly dinner time. Autumn chased us homeward faster and faster each day. The sun threatened to set as golden-hued rays meandered through the thinning canopy, caressing the pile of bones. Even when the sun had gone and the forest had grown deep and dark and endless, the bones would be here still. They were already home.
My mother would be worried if she knew that I was in the woods at dusk. She would be worried even if I told her I wasn’t. Down the street, in a low red-brick house, she cut through a chicken. It was whole and bought warm from the grocery store. The bird was on special with a side of fries and a couple of cans of Coke. The meat came off easily enough. She threw the bones into a plastic bag and froze them. Once winter reared its cold and sickly head, she would pull them from their stasis and make soup.
The bones on the ground were not envious of the bones in the freezer. They would never be soup, but they had nourished nonetheless.
I wanted to lie down with them. To watch as days of silence and nights of stillness rose and fell. To feel myself erode as rainstorms broke upon me. To hear distant calls of people and know they were distant and that I was alone. I wanted the moss and grass to cover me slowly. I wanted the mice and beetles and worms to clean me. I wanted to descend into the earth until I became it.
I bent down and ran my finger along the edge of a longer bone. It felt strong and silken.
Still, I couldn’t quite tell what it had been. The skull, curiously, was gone. The rest of it was in a sort of crescent-shaped jumble. I imagined it had died curled up onto itself. I wondered what it knew of death and dying. Maybe just that something was happening, and it would rather be rested and warm when it did.
