Do you remember the days when men loved other men like sons,
or the days when women gave birth in the oceans of California?
The sea children and their tea notes schooling fish songs—
they kept a bath of grapes for paint in elegant professions.
Merlin painted near the sea.
I can’t tell what men love other men like these days,
or if women still give birth in oceans of California.
I can taste this sea in blood teas and floods,
and the grapes come in smaller packages.
They’ve never met a Merlin.
The fog horse and his paladin,
who ran out of crusades,
forgets the sea is paid for.
The insects flay me for suits.
– James Vu…
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In my backyard—at night there is a mirror—
the American river
I walked to the outcropping
where they once tried to build a bridge
Remember how I taught you to throw stones here?
The angle of your elbow
to skip the smooth rock… 1, 2, 3, 4
The ripples of each skip’s epicenter
The sky is a fusion
between the living and the dead, as the sunset
was fifteen minutes ago
Coyotes howl like a heart skipping
stones among ghosts
I feel the years of a rock worn smooth
against my fingers delicately kissing the
flesh I used to trace over your body, watching
the shadow’s outline each ripple in the unmade bed
The stone falls from my waist
I don’t care to catch it
Clank echoes as the rock abides to the law
This new stone I grab isn’t smooth at all, the edges
remind my fingers of broken glass, of
after the end of a fairytale
and is swallowed by my palm
The rawness is a challenge to skip amidst the clamor
of trees in the delta breeze, my only audience
I submarine my hand beneath the elbow
chock my shoulder
Leaves rustle in anticipation
The sky dies after I cut
the tension, flinging the stone
into mirror
broken glass cascades
down the bathroom vanity
It falls into the tops of my feet
Where I can no longer see myself
I hear all the leaves fall in applause
– Daniel Callahan…
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I am four / and the generator giving us heat has been ruined / by a quiet susurrus / of snow / my mother leaves for help / my father’s whereabouts unknown / I venture out into the white / into the white darkness / barefoot and determined / after five minutes my toes go leather / my eyes harden and scan blankness for life / I’m almost to the neighbor’s house when a deer and her fawn / leap from the drowsing maples / to my right / I stop unsure of the danger / they stop / curiosity overriding fear / I reach out / their two bodies steaming / one cloud of life and / when our eyes meet / I feel something / close to truth / or the first edenic moments / before the fall / then in the space of exhalation / all that remains is the drifting / of snow / pin-pricked with hoofprints / a mother perplexed / and reaching
– Josh Daniel…
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We are ripped from the ground, raindrops skittering like
rhinestones from our wingtips into the ever-expanding air.
And I am leaving you with nothing that cannot be squeezed
into the collapsible frame of the mind, that does not need
to be checked into the hold. Below, a scrawl of arteries
growls with cars and drivers underlining another week,
their tiny red and white lights holding hands way beyond
the reasonable human field of view, the pounding
of their thousand heartbeats shunting blood around
every obstacle. Sometimes it exhausts me just to
watch us all, to wonder how we are carrying on, how
the Earth is not gaining weight despite our restlessness,
is still nothing more nor less than the day it was born,
wrinkled and red-faced, screaming for its life in the
arms of a god who can still pick it out instantly,
however crowded the heavens may have become.…
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Are those your bones Amelia?
Humerus radius tibia
If they could speak what stories would they tell?
How you crawled through fire to save Fred Noonan?
How you were cast away like Robinson Crusoe?
Was Fred your man Friday?
About the sun, sharp and relentless, how it burned your skin, already charred?
About the rain that drenched your shelter, hastily built in the shade of a ren tree?
They say you lived for sixty-one days.
Did you live or just survive?
Were you sad or secretly relieved to be free of photographers’ flashing bulbs
and Lucky Strike?…
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It rained all day and then the next day and then it rained for the next one hundred years. Sometimes it came down hard and other times, just a light mist. People got used to it. It was expected and normal, like the fact that, in the morning, there’d be air to breathe.
People sunned in the rain. They swam and had parties, played ball, rode bikes, cooked out, drank wine and beer. People made love in the rain, divorced in a downpour, washed their cars in a drizzle.
In dreams, people often imagined clear, sunny days. They imagined dry fields and lawns, trees swaying in warm sunshine, lakes and ponds as smooth as a sheet of glass.
There were always a few in each town who couldn’t take it, who let the constant tapping on the roof and windows drive them nearly insane. …
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the room in which they’ve put her hospice bed
brims with whispered talk of Christ a cross
adorned with gaudy plastic beads glitters
above the fireplace her husbands reads
the Bible and tugs my arm to say
she loves this verse his eyes are red and bulge
with cowboy gospel songs she doesn’t budge
except to mutter water to scratch her eye
i know this is her last transfiguration
i know the harp that is her collapsing mouth
is tuned to keys the living cannot fathom
her song is no longer mother but something else
in life she never asked me once to pray
in death i blink and don’t know what to say
– Connor Simons…
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