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.… ...continue reading
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?… ...continue reading
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. … ...continue reading
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… ...continue reading
“Zapis” by Adem Garić
Translated by Mario Frömml (02/20/2019)
In the mornings I call my mother.
Or in the afternoons, on my way back from
the mosque; the scent of blossoms rushes
through a crack in my car window.
White tree tops line the streets
like the kind words I often miss.
It dawns Here when
Bosnia prays the zuhr.
A day is at its zenith when Their
maghrib brings it to its close.
Time is Here a gold dust.
Prospectors all over the place pitch
their tents on the slopes of their days.
Gold, burried in the pits of time,
is running out, ever so dwindling.
I notice that the sky is blue,
and green is the grass, the soil
so wet, right after the rain.… ...continue reading
I thought we wouldn’t get the timing
right when
she stopped eating
I tried chicken
bison dried lamb lung
one day I had nothing
she wanted
she turned away
disappointed
then she stopped drinking
on her last walk
she dragged us through the meadow
to the dog pond and stared at the water
watched the dogs run … ...continue reading
With the harsh kiss of midnight,
bruises like blooming lilac, the blinding
embrace of jasmine, and the ache of beaten-down
shoulders, I’ve reached into a hunter’s moon
and pulled blood, black as murder, for our Eucharist.
I want to preach the sunless morning,
invoke the holy rite of the tabby cat’s
wandering and the acidic smoke of fireplaces
from a dozen neighborhoods, to ease
the chilled breeze, the salt air, and the sea.
I’ve testified to traffic lights and peeled
layers of moonlight, thin as onion skin,
so cats and mockingbirds, possums and raccoons,
the entire congregation of the nocturnal
can raise up a chorus of blood and smoke
and blossoms from their sewer dens, their treetops,
to your doorstep where we share
the spoils of another day.… ...continue reading