Category: Issue 15

 “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God.”                 —Luke 12:6       Night’s dark cadenza fades. To wild               applause of birds, the moon’s cornet-                       bell ducks behind the blue       curtain of dawn. Now, from cracks               and pools that waves have gouged                       into pahoehoe, hermit crabs drag       scavenged shells…

Pulse           June 12, 2016 Us and blindfold in delicious dark. Done deaf by bassline, scouting heat with bladed tongues. Breath a scream spun in reverse and Lord don’t we holler wet down each other’s necks. Rapture and rupture, every sizzled bead of black sweat spit swollen out our skin. O God make naked a flaw…

COORDINATE VISION There may not be a whole world, just              the hole that I know of it. Though I scale up, ever-after a vista              that will hold. Water for whatever dialect of thirst, or map from where              it flows. Of playground rocks tossed at my heels, heels cracked like alpine              contour drawings, drawing a placebo…

The girl sets her pan away from the house, grasps the branch, pulls from the crown a wash of its apples. She breathes loudly into her swollen hands, pulses the pan for some thin company. Miles out from the main road, streets turn to lanes into stone into woods. Discarded stalks and collected decayed return…

Microsatellites Great-grandmother dreamed there were two of you inside, two scorpions locked by their tails, exoskeletons on fire, one wearing great-grandfather’s face, she forgot the other but remembered two mouths exhaling water, I kissed them, she told me, all four cheeks, she saw both of you split the sky where you hunt the hunter and…