For starters, the clock needed to be cleaned. It had to be done at the same time every day, and then the carpet needed to be vacuumed to suck up the footprints that would otherwise reveal that someone had entered the room.
He approached the clock on tiptoe, as if not to wake it, a spray bottle of glass cleaner in one hand and a microfiber cloth in the other. Once his chore was complete, he would need to add the cloth to a pile that he would later take down to the basement to wash. He misted the face of the clock with cleaner and wiped it in smooth, concentric circles, working his way in before turning the cloth over and working his way out.
He had to complete the chore between 3 on the nose and 3:15, or else the clock would chime. It was loud. The clock maker told him long ago that he could turn it down, but the clock had a voice, and one wasn’t meant to dim that. He compensated for the noise of the clock by using a non-electric vacuum—a carpet sweeper is what they called it, back in his movie theater days.
Those carpet sweepers, at the movie theater, were clogged with kernels and slick with butter, leaving impenetrable slug trails in their wake. His carpet sweeper was clean. He made sure by washing it in the bathtub and comparing it to the whistle that dangled from the towel rack.
He was just finishing the vacuuming when, somehow, he kicked the foot of a polished maple side table. He froze, his entire body extended into one long exclamation point, the head of the carpet sweeper punctuating his panic. The porcelain figure of a ballerina pirouetted toward the edge of the tabletop. She spun and spun, her pointed knee the sail of a nearly-turn-turtle boat. Minutes passed. She stopped, one-third of her porcelain base sticking perilously out into the bottomless air. The clock chimed.
Three long, one short. Three long, one short. Three long, one short.
With each long chime, he righted himself a little more, using the short ones to pull the carpet sweeper a few inches closer to his body. When the clock stopped, he turned around and left the room, first to drop the microfiber cloth in its pile, then to bathe the carpet sweeper. The incident with the ballerina would not be forgotten. He would make sure. He would add it to the newsletter. There was always something to report. For starters, the clock needed to be cleaned.
Molly Andrea-Ryan is a poet and prose writer living in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work can be found in Idle Ink, trampset, Barren Magazine, and elsewhere. You can also find her on Twitter @mollyandrearyan.
T50.
Heavy chested again
I need a lie down.
The sun rings come down over my eyes in
white light and I swing them from my hips like hoola hoops.
I dreamt I was scraping my teeth together until I could spit out the shards.
I turned the waves and looked out on
the all-encompassing, oh-so-distant earth.
The August love is unattainable.
Sun´s burnt too gold and now my world´s sat in the shadow of a fire.
Everyone goes about their own routine with closed eyes and equal presence
and I can't stop watching. I dread when I start to notice someone.
Sucker for love and circus.
Let me turn you to honey-
Consuming your affections in degustation. Aching to eat him to the marrow.
Now my hand flicks the blade that
carved the walls of childhood bed scenes.
I'm sitting on summer´s edging with
pant legs pulled from my feet,
wading,
with heaven will wait.
Lay flat afloat the water.
Headstrong-
some love-sick kid.
Innately human
to not be a holy one.
You cut a clementine with my pocket knife.
And I´m cutting knuckles for bodily metamorphosis.
Lev Verlaine is a trans poet based in Washington state. His works have appeared in Querencia Press and Verge Journa. He can be found on instagram @/ casua1haunt and tumblr @/ mutualantagonism
Every morning, I used to send positive text messages to my closest friends, hoping to bring a little sugar to these bitter days.
Lately, I have stopped texting people. I have stopped calling. I stopped singing. I stopped laughing. I stopped masturbating. I stopped picking at old scabs.
I now lay in a grave of matching pillowcases stuffed with mismatched pillows waiting for someone who loved me to show me love in the present tense, waiting for someone to resurrect this dead thing.
Charles K. Carter (he/him) is a queer poet from Iowa. He is the author of Read My Lips (David Robert Books) and several chapbooks. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram @CKCpoetry.
We tried mulberries together for the first time that day that the air was tinged by the scent of summer’s edge— floral musk and the smell of budding violets, the color of dusk
They dangled from the tree that hung across the canopied road Collections of the fallen mulberries clung to the pavement
I hand-picked two for us, a dripping sweet one for me and a purpley tart one for you,
You said this was your first time You’d never tasted a mulberry, a boysenberry, a dewberry
I said I’d clear fields for you to taste the world You said we’d yield a garden together
I sprouted berry seeds in glass jars on my apartment windowsill I burrowed sprouts in fertile soil
She made you a grocery-store bakery mulberry pie and you ate it from her palm
Natalie Duphiney is a graduate student of English, studying at the University of West Florida. She loves rabbits, writing, and choral singing.
There had been another solar flare. Every news broadcaster covered the event, their warnings popping up in the corners of everyone’s antenna TVs. Cracks snaked through their glass screens, distorting the images that flashed from them, The message echoed throughout the sandstone civilization: avoid the Surface, stay indoors, keep magic usage to an all-time minimum.
And so, Mellilla found herself working from the living room of her cramped apartment, a fax from her workplace streaming paper vomit from the printer. Every apartment was designed near identically: each carved directly into the wall of sandstone, clotheslines hanging from balconies, teal paint chipping, windowsills lush with cacti and leaves and offerings. Sunlight streamed down into the Sandstone Walls, casting shadows across tarpaulin awnings and unused ladders. Even in the depths of the Sandstone Walls, much further down than Mellilla’s apartment, the air was still hot and thick with humidity.
Magical anomalies Mellilla still needed to identify were scattered about her coffee table and windowsill alongside sticky note sigils and wooden carvings of the Water Goddesses and potted cacti surrounded by stones. With the sun erratic above the Surface, she couldn’t test each object for magical potency as she normally would (as everyone found their magic unpredictable with the changing sun), and, with the rest of her paper sacrificed to the printer, was forced to simply copy down each anomaly’s properties on the creased surface of a manila folder.
Images flashed across the screen like a laser, which sent Mellilla and Amara’s three cats pouncing. Pip’s three tails twitched. Cats Cricket and Lucky followed suit, the five tails between them curling, their nine combined eyes wide. Pip (Mellilla’s wife’s cat, who was arguably more Mellilla’s than Amara’s) then moved to stand guard on the eastern balcony, which was carved and mounted into the side of the sandstone column.
Mellilla chewed on cheap five-copper noodles as she scribbled down the properties of every anomalous object she catalogued. (A grimoire penned by a woman who believed herself partially amphibian; a sack of glitter that, when opened, automatically placed itself in the deepest cracks and corners of one’s living space; eyeglasses that could supposedly protect the wearer from the sun’s tempestuous moods).
The updates from the reporters on screen droned in the background, the high brightness casting a blue-green glow over the entirety of the apartment. Mellilla turned the volume higher to drown out Amara’s gossiping; she had been talking to her sister all morning, and, thanks to the paper-thin walls, Mellilla could hear everything.
Back on the screen, a woman with sleek brown hair and teeth as unnaturally white as the sun-stained Surface explained that the solar flare should one day die down enough for life to resume a hint of normalcy.
II.
Mellilla put down her folder in favor of drinking directly from her little clay bowl, beef broth from a dented can dripping down the side of her chin and onto the taupe linen of her sweater sleeve. The unnatural woman on screen had been replaced by one of her equally synthetic colleagues, who was much too pleased by the act of thrusting a microphone into the face of another person. The microphone’s sorry victim was cloaked in thick wool, her only distinguishing features being a crooked nose and sallow skin and sullen eyes illuminated by unmistakable determination. When she took down her hood, a crown of curly white hair cascaded down her back, and at that moment she looked typical, with dirty skin and unwashed hair. She would blend in perfectly in the marketplace, just another middle aged woman searching for the last ripe fruits. Mellilla took to her own curls, twirling them between her index and middle fingers.
The woman on screen was introduced as a Speedrunner. She had run to a place she called the Edge of the Universe, at the top of the Surface, under a raging sun.
The Speedrunner began her speech with religion, as people tend to do. Surely if someone went to the state schools then they would know of the Water Pantheon and the goddesses who composed it, and surely they would’ve memorized each prayer and prophecy by heart. As most people of the Sandstone Walls had attended such schools, most knew of the Finding of the Final Goddess, which marked the end of times and an immediate respite from their drought-ridden lives.
And the Speedrunner spoke of an anomaly of the sort that Mellilla would investigate. The latter cocked her head to the side, turning on the closed captioning and replaying what she had heard. The Speedrunner spoke of the End of the Universe, and at the End was a giant plastic crow. She spoke of its height (“fifty meters, give or take”), the protruding seam where the plastic was cauterized into a whole, a hole in the bottom of its rounded talons for the water to drain out. And It, the Crow, spoke of a life where people could live on the Surface and prosper under the sunlight like greenhouse flowers, and where magic was a thing independent of the sun’s tides. And the Crow spoke through her, as she was chosen by the Pantheon, and all one needed to achieve such a life was to offer the Crow a satchel of golds. She spoke of Surface settlements morphing into cities, life and magic and prosperity swirling about and fattening the atmosphere as Crow is hailed and danced about like a maypole—
And Mellilla turned off the TV. Surely the Druidess Council would remove the recording from air, issuing an apology to the Water Pantheon and to the innocent people who had to behold such blasphemy. The sandstone wheel would continue to turn as it always did. Mellilla listened for silence, then called Amara downstairs from the guest bedroom, which they had renovated into a little potter’s studio. The two found no greater joy than ripping into prophets of this sort.
III.
A day had passed, and the Speedrunner looked different. Surely, she still bore the same once-broken nose and lymphatic skin and drooping eyes, but her hair had been straightened, each pale curl flattened under a heat equally as oppressive as the sun’s. She appeared business-professional, whereas before, her wild curls made her ordinary, just another woman from the Sandstone Walls. Her woolen cloak had been replaced by a powder blue suit, adorned with little silver cufflinks in the shape of crows. The apartment was silent as each screenward sentence hung in the air, a prayer in its own right dedicated entirely to Crow.
Mellilla turned to Amara with a scoff, because really this was all (to be rather blunt, as the former put it) just bullshit, some sort of elaborate joke that neither woman could comprehend. Plastic was rare enough as is, and to dangle a better life in front of them was as equally insulting as waving a fish carcass above the head of a half-starved tomcat. And Amara scoffed back, and without regard to bluntness agreed that it was bullshit and nothing more than an elaborate game to test people’s faith.
And then the broadcaster on screen referred to the Speedrunner as a Prophet, one crowned with a capital P, who had taken Crow and placed It amongst the other Water Goddesses as reigning. Because, regardless of sheer absurdity, the theology lined up; as the scriptures said, Crow was unlike the other goddesses who bore blue skin and life and a dozen arms sprouted from their torso. Judgement was in Its eyes, charisma on the Prophet’s tongue. It had been a day, and this marked the first time she was referred to as Prophet.
Mellilla felt as the hinge of her jaw tightened, and she fumbled to turn something else on. Amara stood up after her, their three cats sulking away from the tension that hung thick in the air. Mellilla flipped through each channel, the screen going dim before returning to a speech of the Prophet’s rhetoric, a theocratic lesson, a call to the Surface. All the while Mellilla’s nerves wound up like a child’s toy. Without a word, she stole some paper away from the eternal fax and began scribbling something pointed on the backside. She only stopped writing to notice Amara, who had started into the kitchen.
Mellilla watched Amara return only moments afterwards with a mug of tea and a small clay statue of the Water Pantheon. She looked down at Mellilla’s work—a letter of censorship to the Druidess Council—and corrected a spelling mistake her wife made in the ninth paragraph. She kissed Mellilla on the forehead, setting aside the tea and placing the statue between them; together the two women prayed.
IV.
The Druidess Council was instantly recognizable by the opulence that hung about them, in direct spite of the cheap TV screens they appeared on. They oversaw how religion was practiced in the Sandstone Walls, and it was by their discretion that religious matters appeared on air. Their robes were crimson and glittered with splendor, a living juxtaposition with the teals and indigos and beige that defined life in the Sandstone Walls. On this day—three days after the Prophet’s first appearance —the head of the Druidess Council wore blue, a bird shaped lapel pushed into the collar of her suit. Her message was simple: although some people are upset, even more are left in awe over the pomp and magnificence of the Prophet’s rhetoric. The way she rolled her ‘R’s and matched scripture to life was undeniable, and it all fit neatly into whatever theology could be considered fixed.
The Prophet had called on a witness testimonial to prove the greatness of Crow. Said witness was a little girl, whose mother had taken her to Crow via a wrap of swaddling clothes on her back, her older sister trailing behind them. Crow told them of the paradise that could have awaited them, if only they’d brought a single handful of gold more. The little girl’s mother never returned to the Walls.
Mellilla hadn’t seen that broadcast (she had spent the afternoon annotating pages from the amphibian grimoire and taking in laundry that had spent the evening drying under the stifling heat) and yet she was not free of it. Notifications littered the screen of her tablet. Recommendations for blue suits she could never afford appeared wedged between articles.
But Amara had seen the broadcast, and she wondered aloud how the children could return without their mother. She came to the conclusion that her initial reaction was correct, and she used the word “bullshit” again, and she decided that something was untrue.
Deeper down in the Walls, within the apartments and slums that composed it, a mass migration had begun. Suitcases had been packed and kept beside doors for decades, and inhabitants of the Sandstone Walls had just found a reason to put them to use. They had taken in the Prophet’s newest message, a quick catchphrase that couldn’t be anything but remembered:
“All is futile.”
V.
With the blessing of the Druidess Council buzzing in their minds and blue cloaks on their backs, people left for the Surface in mass droves. Half of the apartment complex was empty. It had only been two days. Mellilla watched as mothers carried their daughters up the metallic ladders to the Surface, Mary Janes clashing against steel, tiny fists pounding against their mother’s breasts. Rogue, unbelieving news broadcasters sent out alerts to every citizen (“Have you forgotten the solar flare? Your hair will spark fire no more than a few minutes on the Surface!”), but nearly everyone who left kept their tablets at home. Those who took them found no worth in the warnings.
Amara had locked herself in her potter’s studio, watching the Prophet speak on live broadcast. The Prophet’s voice was tinny from the tablet speakers in desperate need of repair. The room itself was nearly bare, save for a stone potter’s wheel and a dozen half finished cups. The Prophet’s voice echoed off terracotta caked walls. Amara’s sister had left for Crow that morning. Mellilla kept the front door locked.
Mellilla first noticed the scrap of paper fastened to her door when she collected the cats from the balcony before she clamped the lock bolts shut. It was torn from a yellow pad of paper, a coffee cup stain branding the righthand corner, scribbles drawn in rapid bursts of grainy brown ink. Given the shortage, there was no doubt that the ink was homemade. Amara stood behind Mellilla’s shoulder, deciphering the nearly illegible writing.
Mellilla was still reading by the time Amara finished. Amara lunged for the note, tearing it from her wife’s hands and ripping it into two. Mellilla could see Amara swiping tears from her lower lashes once the paper was on the ground. Mellilla held her wife close as she put the halves together and read.
The first half of the note concerned Mellilla’s letter to the Druidess Council and was written in language so dripping and vile that anyone who dared repeat it, let alone speak it, would forever be branded as slovenly, distinctly lower. Every stroke of ink bore thorns. At the bottom of the page, written in letters much bigger and bolder than the ones that preceded it, was a venomous phrase, the Prophet’s standard call, the written equivalent of lichen and foxglove. Seek Crow.
VI.
A week passed; the sun still shone. Mellilla awoke, and the other side of the bed was cold. Cricket and Pip padded beside her as she stumbled into the living room, and sitting on the table was Lucky, grooming an ear with a pure white paw. Lucky sat on a new note, comprised of a torn manilla folder. Mellilla ripped the note from underneath the cat, and through tears deciphered the Amara’s curled handwriting. Crow, this thing that hadn’t concerned either of them, that could barely be considered an anomaly if not a hoax from someone else, had sent Amara away. She had gone to find her sister. Perhaps they would live a nice life together.
Mellilla crumpled up the torn folder, throwing it at the westward window where people could be seen migrating upwards. That morning she remained by the ratty couch in her living room, tears flowing, people purging from their apartments. When evening came, she cast a spell with no regard to the sun, one that would keep the cat’s bowls filled automatically on the hour. She took up the amphibian grimoire and threw on her sable cloak, drawing the hood over puffy eyes and frizzy curls. When she shut the door behind her she witnessed dozens doing the same.
Mellilla cast a spell upon herself that made her hands tenacious in quality, as if she had dipped them in glue. She took to the ladder, hands burning under the stinging heat, and when she had reached the edge of the ladder began to climb up the sandstone cliffs themselves. Had she looked down towards the bottommost pit of the Walls, she would’ve beheld the skeletons of those who hadn’t been able to keep grip. From the edge of the Surface, when Mellilla looked downwards, the exodus looked to be no more than ants marching. The skeletons were too small to be seen.
VII.
The crust of the Surface crumbled under the slightest touch, the clumps too thick to be referred to as sand but much too friable to be considered anything else. The sky was a brilliant vermilion shade that could be seen in full splendor, even way down in the deepest cracks of the wall. The sun was a bright fuchsia that may have been beautiful if not for the fact that it took up two thirds of the devastated sky. A disorganized cluster of people trekked forward, clad in blue and spilling gold from swollen pockets, eyes glazed over and sweat beading down the sharp of their chin.
Before divinity, the Prophet was a Speedrunner, who had made it to the Edge of the Universe for simple sport. So Mellilla ran. And from behind her the other women cracked smiles, the heat apparent across their chapped faces, their endmost moments defined by a happiness that Mellilla, at last, had seen the light.
Not long afterwards, Mellilla was alone, with nothing but the blazing sun and rock for company. Sweat fell from the tip of her nose and chin, nausea swelling tempestuously in the pit of her chest. In the near distance were tents, those grand settlements that would sprout into cities. Mellilla dared to smile as her mind wandered towards what could be inside. The Prophet, no longer static on a TV screen but someone comprised of blood and hope and a mop of frizzy hair. Hundreds of people content and dancing. Amara and her sister, alive.
Mellilla ran up to the nearest tent and tore open the burnt flap. Within them were skeletons, blue cloaks incendiary, gold melting onto the already deliquescing earth. The bones were bleached.
And Mellilla turned away from this skeleton town, folding in on herself and vomiting. The world seemed to constrict her, something crossed between disappointment and terror rising up and taking over her chest. If only there had been a sign, a billion meters to the Edge of the Universe. If only there had been a sign pointing to Crow’s existence, or a map the Prophet could have provided, or a single feather made from burnt plastic.
And yet there was nothing, because the Edge of the Universe simply hadn’t been.
And when the world turned black, fuchsia and red and ochre melting into obscurity, Mellilla pretended that it was all the giant wing of a magnificent plastic crow.
ALL IS FUTILE
SEEK CROW
My name is Haley Dittbrenner! I am an undergraduate writer based at Susquehanna University. I can be found on Instagram at @hdwritess.
the roadmap of thoughts branch out in crooked forks. dirt paths are compacted from frequent use over centuries. all streams lead to a no-speed-limit roundabout from hell spinning madly, laughing and flinging cars in all directions.
plotting out which routes get us to the fastest conclusion. which stream of thought has the most left turns. which route has the bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic line of ideas accessible to all, slowly, thoroughly. there, on the side, the reason for our hold up. there is a car engulfed in flames on the shoulder of the highway. you check and yes, the driver door is flung open.
neat, organized breath means neat, organized thought. a choke of traffic resolves itself and cars flow out freely again. inhale-one-two-three-four: time to be brave. out-two-three-four: time to be logical. remember all the things you learned in driver’s ed and don’t hit any pedestrians.
2.
how a deep sigh can be a wish tucked very almost silenty under the breath, as not to acknowledge that the fear isn’t there at all – except the shaking hands begin their same rituals and expose it all – (“maybe if i tap my fingers together this way four thousand consecutive times i can protect my loved ones”) – my prayer is to continue the breath, the thoughts, the living. my breath gives those words their wings from my brain to my mouth and out and up to heaven to present my silly little requests for consideration. maybe the sheer quantity of times i pray will earn me an extra lottery draw.
i pray in quiet because i will not admit this weakness to myself, i will continue to ignore what i need in favour of what i think others think i should be needing, jesus h. CHRIST i exclaim multiple times a day. i know there is someone kind waiting for me on the other side of this life but even still i must perform for them, never quite sure if the silent audience is pleased or disappointed.
some days i am sure i am waking up on my deathbed, doomed to succumb to the parasite of anxiety. perhaps everything bad in life is my fault for not being better. looking down i see i am already getting dressed and cooking and going out and socializing and contributing to society. i am not enjoying these moments, but i am proud of my body for taking care of itself when i cannot do it; i am proud of myself like i am teaching little me how to ride a bike and it finally clicks, and i’m watching myself soaring down the street. (but what if little me loses control and crashes and rolls down the hill and flies into traffic and gets crushed by a ten car pile-up that explodes and catches on fire and chemicals burn into the air and infects everyone in a ten mile radius with lung cancer for generations to come? wouldn’t that hurt so bad?)
oh god, oh fuck, i can’t breathe, everything is going to crash around me, brace for cover, i’m sorry for my sins, please spare my loved ones from this eternal suffering i’ve earned,
3.
“more?” she asks, craning her head out the car window. i am laying flat on the driveway by her front wheels.
“keep going,” i call back.
cautiously, she eases her foot off the brake and the car rolls forward down the driveway, the front wheel eating up the side of my sweater and mounting the side of my ribcage. the weight of the car crushes each bone down, flat and neatly compact, with the sound of snapping popsicle sticks. she stuck her head out the window again, nervous. “more?”
i wheeze with my untouched lung, “more!”
over my sternum and the other half of my ribcage, the car tire ironed me out flat. no room for breath, no room for thoughts. the anxiety was now physically and permanently removed from my body by virtue of having nowhere to put it. with my last original breath i celebrate – “no breath, no thoughts!”
i win! i fucking win! now i’m forced to deep belly breathing exclusively, the antidote to all anxiety. old dirty air squeezed out of my belly button with a tea kettle whistle, only drawing in fresh clean air and fresh clean thoughts by inflating the balloon of my stomach, pinned down by the present.
Naked I open myself like a trench coat, like a hustler in an alley, I ask, insistent “What do you want? What do you want from here?” Tell me. Let me know which rib you fancy, and I will lay it at your feet. Tell me that you like the colour of my right eye and I will pluck it right out and lay it in the palm of your hand.
My eyes mirror yours in your disbelief that I would strip myself so bare, right at the entrance of your home, right here, in the middle of it all.
I’ve been open like this for a while now, caught in the staring game between us; my insides cool, my skin raises. You touch it. You touched me. Gripped my arm by its’ skin, tight, so I can see the marks when you leave. But you keep it there.
You keep your palm and your fingers and your skin on mine and beg me with your lips and your eyes to put myself back together, and I do. “You don’t want any?”, I gasp out, like a street-vendor desperate for a dollar.
You exhale and close your eyes, gripping the other arm, keeping me in place. When you open them, I understand everything you don’t say, and my chest blooms forward from the fullness of your gaze.
Here’s what I remember I am 5 and I am balancing a small foot on the palm of my father. He holds me up in the air, like a perfect porcelain ballerina. I am 10, and scared, watching the new Harry Potter movie in the cinema, my dad next to me. I am 13 and having a heated discussion about black holes over the kitchen table. I am 15 and my dad is reading a newspaper at the beach. I am sitting on a towel next him, reading a book. The breeze is warm, and we’re both tanner than usual. We’re of the same skin, my mother always says. I am 18 and my dad is talking to me about driving lessons. I am 18 and my dad hugs me on my birthday. I am 18 and my dad is reading my college applications. I am 18. I am 18 and attending a funeral. I am 19 and I am attending the same funeral. I am 20. I am 21. I am 22. I am 22 and I am attending a funeral everyday. I am 22 and I am 5 and I am 10 and 13 and 18 everyday. Here’s what I remember: all of it and not enough.
I really wish I didn’t have to.
Paradox All my memories are dead cold, icicles on a hunched spine. The fall after the makeshift wings have melted. The feeling of sea, hungrily engulfing a body spent in its own passion. Vision overwhelmed by blue, blurring. Heartbeat fluttering desperately, then slowing down, halting. The lungs choke once, twice. The Body left facing the sky, sun rays caressing the dead, with whispers of apologies. Of “almost” and “if only”. All that is left is a body spent, a never-ending search of consuming warmth, while the body lays, frozen.
Dawn We awakened in the meadow, as the sky turned pink, and the mist rose. We were laying down in the long grass, morning dew like a halo around your strawberry curls, peppering your rosened cheek, your freckled nose.
The first thing my eyes saw that morning was your mouth, parted softly, a renaissance angel in some painting. The sun rose slowly, stretched down towards us. Towards you, as if it missed your skin. As if it knew that your face should always be illuminated by the softest rays of light. That your eyes’ green comes alive like the forest in spring, under the morning light.
As you turned, as you stretched, as you squinted your eyes against the light, eyelashes batting, tantalizing, I remained breathless.
My body lost all sense of function, only my heart. My heart beat to the rhythm of the rustling leaves, of the chirping birds. It beat for you, relentlessly. It camouflaged itself into the sounds of nature, not to disturb your waking, the palpitations pleading for your touch on my skin once more.
When you finally looked at me, with the corner of your right eye, my lungs hiccupped. I could smell a wildfire burning within me. As you twisted towards me, reached for me, to pull me down back into the bliss, I let you. I let you, as what else could I have done? I lay there once more, by your side, looking back at you, as dewdrop fell down my face. Like a sigh. Like a wish. Like a prayer.
A softer sound Today, it’s the softness of your breaths. The licks of cold caressing your face The steam, the condensation, the fog, the clouds. Clusters of air and water and heat and maybe just a little pinch of soul.
Today, it is green. Green like Ireland. Green like once upon a time Green like fairies, green like laughter. Green like grass blades leaning, whispering, sighing, moving, dancing, loving, In the wind Air and earth and water and sunlight, and this time, a little more heart than you thought.
Today, it’s all honey. Sweet, slow, thick, vibrant and glossy. Too much sugar and perfume and even more sunshine.
Baby, baby, baby. Today, it’s love. Soft and hard, hot, and biting-cold. Sharp as sunlight and round as the Moon. It’s love, baby. Today, yesterday tomorrow and all the in-betweens. It’s the ether and the world and the life and the death.
Baby, baby, baby. Today is a sweeter music. Today, it’s all for you
We argued about Keats I could not be convinced that a Grecian urn was more worth An ode than melancholy, my sweet melancholy That which has been haunting me for months
I bought you the Rilke so you’d think of me Alongside your beloved poetry I hope your memories are colored With humid sunlight and full-moon shadows Mine will be, summer camp sweetness on my tongue Something to hold close, something to lament
We weren’t just two ships that passed in the night You’re an ark, loaded two by two with unknown damage And I’m a patched-up schooner, back on the waves once more You left without saying goodbye, so this is mine Maybe I’ll write another ending to this poem one day
Nadia Saleh is a Romantic romantic from southern California. Her work can be found at Moonflake Press, Lavender Bones, and On the Run, among others. Follow her on Twitter @ghost_nadia
My mother warned me, of the pain that would come. How it fits itself into the bone of you, in the places you won’t even let the dark touch. The way it seeps, finds your palm. Tries to brush the depths of the soul, through your fingertips, left freezing. I brush her hand, leave it tainted. Taking some squandered joy, marking her as mine. It would be better if left, but I fear the pain has found us both already. It’s in the tilt of her jaw now, maybe been there longer than we noticed. I promised her love, in sickness and health, in pain and pleasure to cherish her forevermore. I’m afraid it’s another promise, broken.
Lillian Fuglei is a queer poetess based in Denver, Colorado. You can find them on Instagram at literary.lillian.
I’m too tired to write a story about a YouTube Scaled Abuse Analyst, & maybe you are too tired to read it, so here is an outline instead: Tim wakes up at 3:37AM he’s on call some terrible sequence of things has been posted and he, Tim, the Desensitized, bands together with the algorithms to try to stop one kid from seeing whatever heinous thing is in the video(s). Also it’s Mother’s Day and his little independent contracting entity is called 30Ag and it’s a running gag whether it’s pronounced “thirty agg” like Virginia Tech or “30 AG” like a little mishearing of the year Jesus starts his ministry. The story doesn’t work because either a) I have to think up something horrible to be in the video(s) or b) I Infinite Jest it and the video is an unknowable black box, for to know it is already to be lost, & neither of those gets me far enough to want to continue with it, even though I think it’s a good premise, the idea of the scaled abuse analyst as a real job gels so cleanly with my ownexperiences on websites full of terrible things when I was younger, the casual infliction of evil through depersonalized means that now is just part of the fabric of internet existence, you can hardly avoid it, this guy on Twitter with two ✝️s in his display name liked a poem I posted and I saw his pinned tweet was a blog post: “How To Protect Your Family From Adult Content” I’m thinking a Playskool bucket meeting the mid-Atlantic when you read Houellebecq his poems have this kind of stuff happening on trains, sidewalks the seeing of something a certain type of mother would deem unclean annunciation’s opposite Houellebecq’s poems are oddly tender for every “Nous avons passé la nuit sans délivrance” there is also “J’ai toujours eu l’impression que nous étions proches, comme deux fruits issus de la même branche.” Surprisingly green flowers of early May coffee late in the morning, the fog already burned off the mountain I used to think A.D. meant After Death but then with the B. C. meaning Before Christ what years did he live? That actually wasn’t enough of a problem to change my mind about how it worked it made total sense that someone could live outside numbered years that a religion would accept its earthly King by not counting time until after, like a flood of gossip after the party, like communismafter the party, like cleaning up rivers and other bodies of fresh water away my iniquity like a Razor scooter to the shin drawing blood & a little bone & a few views before being taken down a few pegs to pray
Born from smudged designs sketched in the margins of a notebook in disarray, I am—
delicate coils of gold woven in a chain to suit a slip of a girl with clever, dark eyes, I am—
a necklace forged in a daughter’s duty for her family but ultimately a lover’s promise, I am—
presented from mother to daughter, I am.
The hope in a young daughter’s wide eyes and the sorrow glittering on her lashes, I am—
the thin golden noose around her neck as she weds an apathetic man, I am—
stored away in a dusty cupboard in a perpetually empty house in an unfamiliar country, I am—
gazed upon once more in hope as a baby girl babbles in the background, I am.
Displayed from time to time over the years and promised to another young daughter, I am—
abandoned on a bed as a mother screams at her daughter for finding a bride, I am—
cherished by a mother torn between rigid tradition and progression, I am—
A glittering embrace of culture around a bride’s elegant neck as she marries her wife, I am.
Requested by a hesitant husband-to-be several decades prior, I am—
as bright as the new sheen on old traditions, I am—
the golden chain tying together untold and unacknowledged love stories, I am—
presented from mother to daughter, I am.
Tarunika Kapoor is a fiction writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has been published in All My Relations and Open Ceilings. You can find her on Twitter @tarunikakapoor.
Unstamatic 