On the side of the road, the crows gather. They dot the berm—little robed monks in modest black. Picking and pestering. Cawing and careening. Communion is a smattering of roadkill possum.
Take this and eat of it. This is my body, which shall be given up for you.
They partake with reverence: brief flutters of wings, tender peckings, and silent blessings.
A rust-colored smear on the grey highway leads to the offering—who is covered now—shielded from the eyes outside the avian parish by black feathers that become a living funeral shroud.
Take this and drink. This is the blood of the covenant which shall be shed for the forgiveness of sins
The birds drink of it and ascend, singing hymns, wings alight. The possum is brought to the heavens in the mouths of nature’s faithful.…
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George arrived at the office a few minutes early this morning, so he headed over to the employee break room to grab some breakfast before starting his day. The hardwood floorboards swished cold and smooth beneath the soles of his bare feet, and from the way the wintery chill seeped into his skin and settled into the marrow of his aching knees, he could tell the new office manager had forgotten to turn the heat on.
A few moments later, George stepped into the employee break room. Here he saw a man sitting at the lunch table, eating a bowl of corn flakes. George had never seen this man before, but from the rumors he’d recently heard floating around the hallways, he figured this had to be Greene’s new office manager.…
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Jaramillo kept a picture in his wallet of Borges and him, a picture taken on a rainy black-and-white Bogotá afternoon. The young man and the old, the lover and the master. That must have been his proudest moment, for the grin with which he shared it with me could never match the pictured grin. I thought them beautiful; I thought Bogotá beautiful and mine for a moment. What does it mean to meet one’s hero? What thoughts must have stilled and then exploded in his head? What fog in the background, fog that led to low and sinister concrete homes that led to mountains.
Jaramillo introduced me to Borges when I was just a college sophomore, a year when the power of the imagination hinted at me but withheld itself.…
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The gray sky looks threatening, and the inflation rate too. “Watch out. Something big is going to happen and soon,” Lloyd says. “I can assure you, Jennifer. A change in the algorithm.” He coughs for emphasis.
She rolls her eyes. She’s good at rolling her eyes. What algorithm is he talking about? Lloyd is not sure exactly, but it’s a big one. It might involve the crypto-currency markets. A lot of clues come from his chirpy birds at the feeder. “Possibly, a calculation regarding the spread of avian flu.” He fumbles with the seed bag.
“Your birds, right, like you own those chickadees,” Jennifer thinks. She helps him install a fresh suet cake in the cage and re-hang it off the eave.
Lloyd waves a finger in the air.…
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Anne always drove too fast. It was after midnight now and the road home was hazy with fog. There were no street lights here in the “old” side of town, just cracked, glowing paint, and the occasional rusted railing reminding you where the cliffs were. Anne had been staying later and later at the shop since she started working there, preferring its armchairs and views of downtown to the quiet and dark of her own apartment. Anne yawned, keeping her eyes dead ahead where her high beams bounced off of the fog, her eyes burned with concentration and tiredness. A burst of dark brown fur rushed into view and Anne slammed on the breaks.
The deer stared at Anne, nostrils flared and eyes shining in the darkness.…
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– Onry
Author’s Note: “Livin’ in the Light” is a video of a song I wrote about my experience singing in Portland during quarantine and at civil rights protests as one of the only Black male opera singers in the Pacific Northwest.…
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Long before desire benched the boy
I was and took the field, we escaped
baking in our old brick oven
those summer nights, when Pops
ran a cord to the porch window,
so we could sit listening to katydid shrieks
compete with buzzing ballpark fans peppered
by vendors’ hawking cold beer and peanuts,
as fireflies signaled heater, deuce.…
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