The Bookends Review

Landscapers remove
weedy bushes
in smoke
from distant fires.

A dead-looking sky 
inert in a cloud coffin. 

Saws blare.  Branches
heap up.   

The crew leaves us
with more light
that I stand in,
briefly, before
returning to
our closed-up house. 

– Kenneth Pobo…

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Home reeks of lime
and mildew. We hoist
a box spring through the second-
floor window—
dirt beneath creme brulee nails,
tip-toeing around next door’s
double panes, the clatter
of a dead woman’s rose-colored
dresser drawers echoes
in the afternoon.

– Rebecca Ferlotti

Note: This piece was originally published in Mock Orange Magazine (2013, now defunct)…

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This was back when the Greek was still sleeping in his car. The war was in its second or third surge. No one could keep track anymore; we just knew we weren’t going to lose it.

We’d been out of high school for about a year, some of us fast becoming townies. One of us had gone down to college in Austin. We called him Spray Can because it seemed like all he had shaking around in his head was one marble. It was more of an ironic nickname because he had to be the smartest one among us, which wasn’t saying much. He was also—not uncoincidentally—the only virgin.

The Greek would also move to Austin later that year. And this was just before Sam moved up to Portland to follow his brother and another friend, part of the early noughties mass exodus in search of rain because none of it was falling where we were.…

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The prickly pear tea brought him back to Santa Fe — brought him back to her. It had been years since that week in the small adobe brick shack outside of town, nestled amongst the rolling dunes and the looming saguaros. How long ago had it been? Seven years? Ten years? He would have been a younger man then, just turned twenty-one and she, an older woman. She had seen decades of change in the city before he was even born. And still more before he had even stepped foot off the train into her strange land. She fascinated him — in the way she thought, in the way she spoke, in the way her strong-legged silhouette straddled him in the flicker of candlelight. He bowed to her gospel.…

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A face on its side caught mid-anguished scream, lying in the barren, arid dunes is a common symbol of decay. Ozymandian, they say. A touchstone. A callback. Look upon me and weep, I think.

****

Augustus Boyle, as I insist on calling him after the fact, insists that I join him on a quest. I’d dithered. I’d been down this road, in the desert on some journeyman shit before. I spent part of my twenties running in circles about the Geezer Bandit before doing heavy journalism on sandwiches. Now, in my own This American Life-sort of way, a story has come to me, and I don’t want to offend it, but does anybody even want journalism anymore?

“It’s to bear witness,” he says. The first time he says it through an encrypted message on a private server.…

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I drip paint on the neighbor’s lilies
from the balcony above,
pluck leaves from branches
parked next to my house.
I throw them off
as peace offerings. The flowers cry—
milky,
stained.
At night,
I push a glass of water
off the ledge. It shatters
over daisies. Their lights
flicker. The dog
barks. They say, “It must’ve been
a chipmunk.”

– Rebecca Ferlotti

Note: This piece was originally published in Wingless Dreamer (2021)…

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my country tis of thee—

invade women’s bodies
deport non-white people
beat up leftist voices

my country tis of thee—

no food for the poor
no meds for the poor
no homes for the poor

my country tis of thee—

cut down the trees
poison the water
pollute the air

my country tis of thee—
sweet land
of tyranny

for thee i grieve

– Ron Torrence…

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