I suppose you want my wallet. No? My body then. Centuries of splintered glass went into these cheekbones. I see something in the curve of your aura that reminds me of someone I once knew. Can you step into my light? Reputations are made and broken in such places as this. If you say there are rats, I will believe you, though I don’t hear or see them. There is always a gnawing hunger driving them from dark corners. I used to fear them, before I felt their hunger. I can’t remember when I first saw you stepping into my shadow, biting the back of my heels. You were younger then and I was a body of water caught beneath winter’s ice. You know that feeling? Where limitation meets longing? So much of you remains in these doggy bagged bins. There is still starvation, even in this excess, saturation that can be held but not consumed. There is a dare beneath the lid, if you can stand the smell of it. Look closely. The contents change but the picture stays the same. You digest truth like last night’s dinner rush. Taste consequences like the rotting corpse posing as nourishment. Is every meaning cut as kaleidoscope prisms? You see my face in the slop of life’s leftovers but never recognize it. Everything you create is just me with soft filters, me with twelve fingers, me in all caps, in all language, all gods. My reflection is captured in blurred outlines and sharp corners, the angular intersection of humanity, gorging on what they can never admit was a beggar’s meal dug in fistfuls from rotten excess by a dumpster diver. But at least, I still see myself clearly. At least, I still look beautiful covered in your digital rot.

A screech owl startles the angels into flight—: a whirlwind, a frayed rapture. Our guts roil; phones bleat alarms as angels scatter and reconvene. Wingbeats, wingbeats. They whisper to one another in the dark. Starlight pierces the occasional feather. Can angels be embarrassed? A ruffling of branches as they resettle for the night. We dare not ask why they are here. They murmur to one another until again the owl cries and again they rise. We give up on sleep in our corner of the city. A silence grows around our homes—deeper for our knowing how easily it might break.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from Susan Jessen during our annual Kickstarter.]

After Hua Long Dian Jing

I  Then
If you must know: the key to dragon-making lies
in the paint you use. You see: it must be heavy
enough to withstand the typhoons of the South,
yet light enough to ride the East’s measured breaths.

II  Now
From my mother, I’ve inherited
dark eyes, nimble knuckles, and from my father—
sometimes,
I think,
a thirst
for air.

III  Then
Recall: a dragon has no use for wings,
and in that sense, it is like the opposite
of a flightless bird.
Recall: when he tells you this joke
that I was the one who taught it to him.

IV  Now
When I was too young to understand,
I was still old enough to dream—
while the other children gorged
on tales of wild storks—
that I might have been conceived
with a drop
of paint.

V  Then
When you get there, ask him if he remembers: that night years ago, when the power went out,
and we let loose our dragon by the sun of a thousand fireflies. Ask him if he remembers:
how I turned, and the breath left his lungs, and we held each other—he, trembling
in my arms, pale as a ghost. And when you return, ask me if I remember: how I
turned and gleaned terror where there was only desire, how we held
each other, that night years ago, but he was already gone—
for it was not the key to dragon-making that held him
in thrall, but what it might finally mean
to fly.

VI  Now
You see: it was only a matter
of dotting the eyes—

VII  After
And yes, oh, yes—
of time, too.

After the night that the sea turned into stone so solid you could walk along it, we stopped fighting the changes we knew would come. Even as the trees were softening, their bark for the hungry to scrape and scrape and spread it on whatever bread they could beg or bake. Even when the grass became a golden pelt, warm to the touch, and rose and fell like the back of an animal breathing.

I had one red crayon left for listing, one left to catalogue. How the water was salt and we drank it anyway and lived. How the yellow sun had an edge of green just before twilight. And didn’t the moon smile at us with an uncle’s smile?

We didn’t expect anyone, any visitors, any army or cloud or magician or weather to arrive and save us. Some of the old thought to turn in/to sleep early. They hung their hammocks in a copse of trees west of the city and swung back and forth, a little, and then not at all. How they slept. We never knew there could be such sleeping, and from time to time, we saw a new hammock among the stilled ones. I know what you’re thinking—the bodies? What of them. But I tell you the old became like grasshoppers, husks of the bodies they once were, dry and barely anything. Their voices pared down to a few high notes then a note and then a quiet that was something you could lean into, thick but weightless.

Maybe some went on and are yet living, among the young who feed and listen to the stories they invent or remember or half remember and stitch together with threads they pluck from the hopes of those breathing. Stitched and in time unraveling, but not yet unraveling.

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from Kewayne Wadley during our annual Kickstarter.]

you will disembowel the bird
i must warn you before all else
before you poke and prod
at your new brood of yellow chicks
and find threads hanging

if you try to pull the string
you will disembowel the bird
because it is attached
to their tiny internal organs
exactly as yours would be

if you are a sewer
or a general fusser
you will disembowel the bird
treating it like a sweater
and pulling without thinking

you have to slow down
when you rear young chicks
it’s possible that even by mistake
you will disembowel the bird
with an errant movement

but then you should not cry
you should put the creature down
swift and sure
sooner or later, sadly,
you will disembowel the bird

I unzipped my skin and all my bones fell out. This was not by design: I meant to loose my soul from the forest of my lungs, unfurl its banner past my legs and my toes and there, in the blameless earth, find a new alchemy for living. Instead—bones. Ribcage smiling across the grass. Femurs and tibias and clavicles in their wet dynasties between dirt, between roots, between the fern crawling its quiet way through this lower heaven.

You must not let them recollect me. Sing to the wind until it remembers its promise: The only law is motion. The only scripture is change. I have no more excuses; metacarpal tumble, they are lost to the loam. Only this reason remains: I wanted motion. I needed change. No wind can reach the cage they are crafting. I was staring down the barrel of stillness—the bleak gargoyle, its dazzling gunpowder, those months when only we were hysterical. Everyone else watched us from the boiling sea. Policies fell upon us, hard rain. Every headline a new lash of laughter: can it get worse? I decided I would not bear witness; they would strike no pillar of salt from me.

I remanded myself back to nature. I slipped open my skin and out came the bones. Perhaps this is for the better. The flesh has always sat strangely but the bones never betrayed. Freed from the burden of bearing, they do now as they always dreamed: kiss the moss, kiss the leaves. My bones are conferring with the earth. My bones are considering the vagrant seeds. They too wish to grow of themselves more selves, coccyx chrysalis unspooling into spines, into shoulder blades, into the steep curve of a jaw, a jewel, jumbled bouquet of geometries never to be resolved. A forensic mystery: did these bones belong to a man?

What is a man but bones and bones and bones, black wind pushing through a tunnel. This is what I learned through the unsteady years of needles and tubing and scars corded across my thickening flesh, fat recanting its vows of softness, settling against the pelvis in pouting shelves. Muscle is malleable but the bones remain. They are accustomed, now—to molting, eschewing, stripping my self from myself until I am more. Here is a riddle: what grows happier the more you take away? I never knew such joy until that day. Emerging from that blissed, undreaming haze and realizing, at last, I was free. I was only a box of pieces, but those pieces were not me.

You must not let them regather me. Not even the heap my bones have left behind. Pour my eyes into the river. My tongue, threaded through the trees. What must you tell them, when they ask where I am? Listen and listen, even the earth will not say:

Adjust the color of the sky,
my phone offers, trapped in the kindergarten knowledge
that cherry-blossom and atmosphere are distinct.
The sky-color is as cold as a sheet of paper
that only says true things:
my country does not love me; I don’t know
if you will pass the gate tomorrow after
they take your photograph;
I am still alive.

[Editor’s Note: The publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from Gwynne Garfinkle during our annual Kickstarter.]

Let me tell you something about the ocean

that not many people know.

About the first symbiosis between

the first girl and the first saltwater body.

In the beginning, the ocean was lonely

and so she created a fifteen-year-old girl

(or was it the other way around?)

and she created a whole mess of other stuff too,

which she now considers a juvenile

and slightly embarrassing mistake,

like podcasts and presidents and interest rates.

But fifteen-year-old girls are all that matter.

That’s the only time it works.

Think about it; at fifteen you’re not actually a girl

(much less a person, the audacity)

you’re a girl-shaped puncture wound,

a girl-shaped ravine,

a girl-shaped throatlump,

a girl-shaped scream.

And the ocean is the only thing big enough

to fill all that negative space of fifteen

with saltwater and corals and plankton

and shipwrecks down in the saltdark deep.

In the ocean you can be angry

or you can be alive, but never both.

The ocean has no use for anger.

If you stay angry you’ll fill up your lungs

with seaweed, grow barnacles

in the hollows of your cheeks.

You can live comfortably as shaking fists

and trembling teeth for three to seven business days

(which is the amount of time it’ll take you to die)

or sometimes you even last a year and a day

depending on which kind of story it is

and whether or not the fae are involved.

But staying angry is your choice

and the ocean does more than most

letting you keep your anger and nurse it

all the way to a saltsoft sandy grave.

But being angry in the ocean

doesn’t do you or her much good,

except that some lucky yellowtail

or a sharp-eyed squid gets a mediocre meal

once you’ve curled up into a seductive

devour-me pose on the seabed floor.

But maybe you fall into the ocean and forget

how to be angry, or maybe you remember

but you look around at the deepsea dogfish

chasing ephemeral tails and the gulperfish

with maws like sunken sails and you think

well what’s the fucking point of anger anyway?

When that happens, when a girl and an ocean

and loneliness and anger (or lack thereof)

all line up perfectly like shots on a bar,

or rocks orbiting a dying star,

well then that’s how the ocean falls in love

and that’s how you turn into me.

You get a tail the size of the Atlantic, sticky

bubblegum-blue scales, hurricane-Katrina wings,

gutsharp teeth. And you get to vomit

up that lump that’s been stuck in your throat

since forever, since fifteen, because no one down here

gives a shit about your screams.

And if you have to ask what I am

then you haven’t been listening

and this is probably too primal for you anyway,

too Grendel too Smaug too Hydra too Quetzalcoatl,

and we both know that phallic sword

in your hand doesn’t make you St. George.

So here’s how the end of this story will go.

It’s late and I’ve got another appointment

on another current with another wannabe

knight who thinks I need slaying

or penetrating or debating or whatever

it is your monkey hormones believe

will finally make you feel like a man.

Like you’ve got anything I want

or anything I need or anything

that could impress eternity.

I have a seasalt lover waiting at home

with whale bone dinner and oceanic trench

thighs and a hydrostatic pressure kiss

that would liquify your primate mind.

Did you know the ocean has a name

that’s older than the sound of time?

She’s a lot more forgiving than me

and she’ll whisper it to you

if you go down enough into her deep.

So come here, come closer, don’t worry

about the next lines.

That’s not water in your lungs,

that’s not tearing in your spine.

It’s just the taste of victory.

There are ghosts down here to flatter you

into believing you’re something interesting,

and isn’t that all you ever wanted in life?

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from Kat Jones during our annual Kickstarter.]

The mother tide goes out. And stays.
Sends me a text. Three emojis:
Yellow hand waving.
Palm tree.
Palm tree.
Fish rot on the desert floor, and the
Smell of old ashtrays
Fills my ears with the hollow
Wringing of gnarled hands.

The bloody moon sails away.
It’s me not you, and the
Hole in the sky still weeps sticky tears.
Come see, but the
Guests are mannikins
Trapped in their chairs forever.
No one does the dishes.

I tried to step off, once or twice
Eons ago, but the anguish of the
World left
Imprints in my doughy skin.
Held me fast.
Our scars might fit, I cry, but
Only the crows will listen.

Babies are the worst.
One blink and they've crashed the
Ship. Stepped onto a newsworthy plane.
Stopped answering their phone.
Jesus, Dad. It died. No big deal.
The tooth fairy skips your house, and
Dusty presents scream from the
Empty living room.

The point became a line.

The line, a triangle.
The simplest shape.

The triangles bred and twisted,
replicating themselves.
Layering, one on top of the other.

Spinning and spilling over,
They drew into themselves the spaces between
encountering, to their surprise,
circles
who dreamt of spinning spheres.

The two strangers fought,
but decided the better of it,
and instead, grew enamored.

Interbred.
Interlocked.
Sweating hands grasped in mutual, moaning ecstasy.

Sharing secrets immemorial:
the mysteries of angles,
the enigmas of Pi.

To create square and ellipse.
Hexagon, sphere, and cone.
Parabola and hyperbola,
Chladni figure and Gabriel’s horn.
Cassini’s oval and torus’s knot.

Together,
they forged new realities,
becoming all that is:

All shapes, asymmetric and isotropic.
All sounds, harmonic and dissonant.
All numbers, real and imaginary.
All beings, fantastic and factual.
All thoughts, fleeting and terminal.

And all those things we mistake for the living—
and for the dead.

[Editor’s Note: The publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from John Klima during our annual Kickstarter.]

We thought we were bringing good things to life until sometime in the night, we heard rocking and knocking and rapping and tapping, a million trillion tiny feet skittering across the open oven door. Before we could get a handle on refrigerator demons and washing machine monsters, a horde of unhappy housewives filed for divorce and the course of the future veered left, leaving history in the hands of men who built appliances for someone else to use. We choose to believe they won the warehouse war, but the blood on the floor says otherwise: a million, trillion tiny footprints spell out “we were here and then we weren’t.” Not even an apron left as evidence.

“They are the world’s largest boney fish, weighing up to 5,000 pounds … They are so completely useless that scientists even debate about how they move.” — User on r/copypasta

Don’t know what I am. Don’t know
what is large. Don’t know pancake, don’t
know Ferris wheel. Know the drift. The cut-star glow.
Like it pelagic. Don’t know seaweed stinks. Love soft ooh
of eel larvae. Don’t know maggy craw of mouth. Don’t know
fearful keratin. Bright beak smack. Love all is mine,
love my clavus fin. Don’t know why they
bob? In blue death boxes? Sunless wreck.
Ozempic and Brylcreem. Their blue—
my blue. Beautiful me.

Easy to blame the world’s ills

on a single

cause: godliness or godlessness

tolerance or tyrants

to look for a reason divine or natural

but regardless,

the fire comes sweeping over the hills.

Insanity even

of a “fire season”

let alone when

they blend into one

without end

Earth scrubbing furiously

at the irritation on her skin.

Certainly eternal life is a nice thought

but real life is just rot

like pharaohs dying

with the most playthings

fully poseable worshippers

kneeling before unopposable

kings.

Let us bury that curse back underground

a mass grave of all our Barbies

interred in a pyramid.

Polly Pocket’s perfect microcosm

like a clamshell

of birth-control placebo pills

and a G.I. Joe with

100 confirmed kills.

You can play homemaker

or warmonger

human lifeswitch, off or on.

You can be the toy or the doll

but never in control.

You can seek to be fulfilled

by something natural

or divine

but never within your own mind.

Inject direct

the petroleum of salvation

forever chemicals for

forever skin.

Rubber garden guarded by the weapons

of heaven

but the sword of faith

started the blaze

in the first place.

Plastic paradise awaits

inside the planned community’s gates

and still

the fire comes sweeping over the hills.

(after the painting by Bruegel the Elder)
 
One woman makes a din,
hammering her stewpot into a sword,
clashing into armor that clashes
with her apron and skirt,
and when told to be quiet,
nevertheless she persists.

Two women make a lot of trouble,
gossiping in corners about
hexes of protection, spells
to summon higher pay, about
secrets they were told
no one would ever believe—
secrets, it turns out, too many
of them share.

Three women make an annual market,
gathering to sell
safety, solidarity, sympathy, strength,
commodities closed out
of the official economy—
and when they are told
they have enough, their hands are full,
they point at the gold-
stuffed storehouses of men and ask,
how much can your hands hold
and yet still grab our assets?

Four women make a quarrel,
a squabble, a spat,
any term trimming them down
to triviality—inevitable debates
over strategy and blame,
personalities prickling
as people perpetually do,
fault lines forming into factions,
impatience taking a match to the market
and threatening to burn it all down
for the flaw of imperfection,
while behind the smoke screen,
the enemy fans the flame.

Five women make an army,
marching arm in arm,
fractious, ferocious,
raiding at the very gates of Hell
to free those souls unjustly chained
and lock up the ones whose sins
have gone too long excused,
to bedevil the comfortable
and comfort the bedeviled,
to resolve an unholy din
into holy chorus, many voices
raised like the dead
from the silence
of oppression’s grave.

And against six the Devil himself has no weapon.
 
 

[Editor’s Note: You can click here to read Marie Brennan’s notes on the poem, a part of our criticism special.]

—after So Long A Letter by Mariama Bâ

A giant throbbing blob of eyeballs hovers
at my front door, long wings flapping,
fat gooey tears dripping, soaking
my welcome mat.

May I come in?

I want to scream and run away
but what would my mother think,
her good and faithful Christian
daughter fleeing from God?

I invite the angel inside.

When I return to the dining room
my hands shake so bad they make
the cups of tea I carry splash, tinkling.

The angel’s pupils all look
at their tea cup, baffled.

I feel so stupid.

Angels don’t have mouths.

Your guardian angel
has killed herself.

All I can do is blink.
I was not expecting this.
“I beg your pardon?” I ask.

I am sorry to tell you this.

“But—how? Why?”

Yes. Why?

The angel’s pupils dart around
my house: the unwashed clothes
piled on the sofa, the litter box
reeking, my tangled hair,
all the dust.

Why indeed.

For a moment, we are silent.

“What does this mean?”

This means your soul
will soon be exposed
to demonic forces.
And you will die.

“What?!”

Yes.

“I—no, no—I mean,
can’t you bring her back?”

Lidless, yet I swear
the angel’s eyes all squint.

That is not how this works.

“But I don’t understand.”

Thank you for the tea.

Abruptly, the angel hovers away
leaving a trail of ooze. They slam
through the closed front door,
shattering it to pieces.

“Wait!” I yell, following.

I must be going.

The angel ascends
via holy light.

Like a true sinner, I plead,
“Please! I don’t wanna die!”

Exasperated, the angel spins
around to face me, scowling
down at me from the clouds.

Lady, death is just
as beautiful
as life
has been.

[Editor's note: You can click here to read Seth Wade's accompanying essay, a part of our criticism special.]

I owe thanks to Kate Heartfield’s novel The Chatelaine (originally published as Armed in Her Fashion) for introducing me to Dulle Griet. An army of women raiding Hell: it sounded amazing! Imagine my disappointment when I discovered the painting is widely assumed to be a condemnation of women, mocking them for being noisy, aggressive, and greedy. Dulle Griet going after more valuables when her hands are already full might be a bit much, but the rest struck me as a sixteenth-century iteration of the gendered, dichotomous interpretation of behavior. Men raid Hell? They are strong and brave. Women raid Hell? How foolish of them.

As I kept reading that Wikipedia page, though, I arrived at the Flemish proverb that supplies the italicized lines in my poem, and I was struck by how—for a modern reader, at least—it moves from misogyny to something that sounds pretty bad-ass. There’s a long folkloric tradition of tales and songs about women so contrary or shrewish even the Devil washes his hands of them, but it takes only a tiny tilt of perspective to see that in a different light—to turn lamentable fractiousness into admirable ferociousness. Pair that with the upward counting of the proverb, and it starts to look like misogyny wins when women are isolated or few in number, but mass solidarity can carry the day.

I titled and subtitled this poem to point toward Bruegel’s painting, because that’s not an image so well known I can assume the average reader will be familiar with it. It’s not just a response to that one source, though; the proverb gave me my structuring principle, and of course individual lines allude to specific incidents or patterns of sexism in the modern world. Sadly, even if the reader doesn’t pick up on a single one of the references, I suspect the general thrust of the poem will be all too comprehensible. We are far from the point at which misogyny itself is a historical curiosity that requires explanation.

1. This poem was initially inspired by a line of dialogue near the beginning of So Long A Letter by Mariama Bâ, which is also the last line of the poem and the moment I tried to build up to: “Lady, death is just as beautiful as life has been.” This sentence made many different ideas and feelings that had been on my mind sort of suddenly click together, and I began exploring.
    
   1. The novel opens with the main character Ramatoulaye going through 'Iddah, a four month and ten day mourning process that widows in Muslim Senegalese culture must follow. During the funeral proceedings after her husband’s death, she struggles with her feelings regarding the religious, cultural, and gender expectations placed upon her.
       
      Of the many indignities she endures, there is this fascinating moment where this old woman who is attending comes across Ramatoulaye. She is indulging herself on the free food, cola nuts that “reddened” her teeth as she spoke, when she sees Ramatoulaye looking miserable. She looks at her “disappointingly”, and then says this line. This moment moved me, and seemed to capture so much.
       
   2. And this moment made me think of the religious, cultural, and gender expectations placed upon me and others I care about in my life, which, growing up in the rural Midwest, meant Christianity and heteronormativity. As a queer person who grew up in a homophobic environment, I developed a pretty complicated relationship to Christianity.
       
      Every religion or attached cultural makeup has its quirks, and certainly its faults. In this poem, I tried to capture the almost mind-numbing bewilderment you experience when you are faced with these expectations, when these expectations go against one or more of your identities, or is otherwise depressing or disorienting to endure.
       
2. In philosophy (I’m currently in a PhD program out in Florida), my primary research actually focuses on the ethics of technology, but I’ve always been interested in feminism, queer theory, social epistemology, and other ways of analyzing and understanding our social world. So, some of my readings on womanism also came to mind.
    
   1. It also felt right to title this poem after this classic vaudeville-style blues song (I love blues) called “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues” (or also called “Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues” or “Wild Women”). It has a strong feminist message, and the song was performed by many female blues singers over time.
       
      This sort of musical line of sisterhood (or, all these singers connecting to each other over song, about this subject matter) echoed to me the importance of friendship and connection in So Long A Letter. The novel is epistolary, written as a long letter to Ramatoulaye’s best friend, Aissatou, another woman who she deeply connects with, and who she is able to talk about her innermost controversial feelings with.
       
      I also like the connection of sadness and “blues,” as the narrator of my poem wasn’t doing that great, even before she was informed her guardian angel killed herself (note that this angel was also female), and now the narrator’s soul will soon be attacked by demons. And to think she thought her day couldn’t get any worse!
       
3. And then there’s the fact that this is a speculative poem … it’s hard for me to articulate the logic behind my ideas, but I absolutely love surreal absurdity. I like to say I try to “craft sense through nonsense,” and I very much agree with Bianca Stone, an amazing poet and previous mentor of mine, who says that her poems often know more than she does. I just loved the premise of waking up one horrible morning to this angelic horror at your front door, here to tell you your guardian angel is no more, like some sort of holy general arriving to tell you your lover was slain on the battlefield.
    
   Symbolically though, I’m happy that the biblical depiction of angels has so many eyes, because this also reflects the many glaring “eyes” of society, regarding expectations. Like how the narrator in my poem’s first thought was what her mother would think of her actions, and so on.
    
   And then of course the ending—I tried to build up to it, to that phrase and all that was packed inside it. Having an angel who was kind of awkward and rude, and who gave you bad news, fly away and scowl down at you from the clouds, like you’re a some sort of misbehaving child … I felt that way often growing up, not fitting into the social world around me, in the rural Midwest. Those disapproving looks were demeaning, but also terrifying, in a way. Sometimes I didn’t know what would happen, how they would react after that look of disgusted recognition—if I was about to be verbally harassed, kicked out places, or assaulted.
    
   So that ending of the poem was, for me, such a mood: this horrifying ridiculousness of life, of what little control we have over how we see the world, and how the world sees us.

She is not the one sitting over at the pit
where the exhalations of Earth’s conflagrations rise
omit what kind of Trance
takes her mind on another plane to dance

She is not the one on the tri-legged stool
balancing her bottom before worshipping fools
that’s not her Hustle, that’s not her story
that’s not her desire, to be worshipped
she does not seek Glory

What Oracle she may be comes from knowing
where the grain was cast, the roof raised,
the Harvest threshed, the rent party held,
she casts salt before the threshold
and stayed after to sage the joint

She smokes clove cigarettes mixed with unknowables

the black fairy in the village sold her a dime for a nickel
smiling beatifically in recognition of kindred sistership
o sweet tiny glorythis is what she leads us to
this is what she ushers in

What was lost, what was saved
what is planted above the grave
how the hearth in the home was made
add who gathers its fuel, peat or log,
twig or branch, child, parents, fool—

She is their Priestess and honored
with gifts, a special bit of this
first oil pressed, fermented fruit, early juice,
and that, late harvest wine, herbed vinegars
breads, the jangle of the smith’s hammerings
fierce forged, spare fire

She is of them   she can guide them
because she knows them she can guide them
because she knows

 
 
 
[Editor’s Note: The publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from D Franklin during our annual Kickstarter.]

They say she flew.
I say she was flung.

A woman drinks what was never hers.
The sky remembers theft like scripture.

The moon was not her destination.
It was a sentence.

She landed with her hair aflame, mouth full of names
no one asked her to keep.

No one tells you the elixir tastes like metal,
or that godhood burns going down.

She does not miss the archer.
She misses hunger, noise, the heat of being wrong.

Up here, everything glows—sterile.
Even silence grows a spine.

When she walks, the dust remembers.
When she speaks, the craters shudder.

Some nights, she carves her name into the dust
just to watch it vanish again.

Tell the children: she is lonely.
Tell them: she would do it again.

Do you swallow big blue whale eyes straight out of the jar?
Do you ever leave the refrigerator door open
and just shovel them in your maw
in the middle of the night?

Do you swirl them up with mountain-milk?
Make little baby-grey sorbets
that you freeze by free-diving
to the place where the ocean loses light?

Was your mother the sort to stop up storms when she stood tall?
And now do nearby lightning strikes ever feel at all like therapy?
Or are you still a little too small to handle that much energy?

Is it in your nature to treat the tallest trees like broccoli?
When you entertain do you spend hours trying out new recipes
for old growth salads?
Or are you more of a just let the birds fly right into your mouth type?

Do you carry plumbing pipes around with you to stick in small town water towers?
Drink counties dry to whet your whistle?
Or do your boots have aquifers?

Do your shoulder blades catch all the Drink n Wash that you will need for later?
Or does it all roll off your back?
Does it splash?

Does our world cake between your toes?
Do you ever get helicopters stuck up in your nose?

And when you get up from a nap
Does it remind you at all of founding a monument?
Or is it more like tilling the map?
Or something I didn’t dare to guess at?
Something closer to home?

Do you ever see
any of the things that we
have cut into the ground for you
Or do you have
Bigger things to worry about?

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a gift from Ed Morland during our annual Kickstarter.]

Don’t cease, my darling; maintain
your pulse unchanging.

When you falter, recall that age
is not your master,

any more than time has ever yet
mastered me.

Sit with me as I grow older:
let my hand caress

your gentle scales, as months are tallied
by your organs and your veins.

My life’s clock is tucked tenderly
within your breast,

where I stored it once
to loan my time to your survival.

I listen now
as its ticking slows.

I have brought you back to life before,

but I have so little
of my living left to give.

I. The Founding, 2040

John bought the lake house for pennies
on the dollar, split it, part headquarters
part museum. His father’s shovel hung
like the leg bone of a dead saint above
his desk, refracting amber dustlight.

A terrain model of the brinefields shone
under fixed lights with a glossy sheen.
The old docks stick out, fifty feet up,
like old railroad trestles, half dynamited.
Around the room, behind glass cases

are catalogued finds by year; fished
out, dredged, tractor-pulled, unearthed.
Colorful at first, then slowly tauped—
electronics, boats, and factory parts
then the nearly fossilized, pre-industrial.

John’s rise, from day labor to magnate,
meteoric in hindsight, seemed natural
to him. People fell, he took their place.
His shovel dug, he understood patterns,
then pointed at maps for where to dig.

Then told investors how much to dig.
The government added funds, sometimes
without him asking. He hired geologists
for that textbook glaze to his intuition
to parrot in front of Congress and CNN.

He bought the building he grew up in,
walled off the apartment he had shared
with his father and converted the rest
for his dustmen, dustwomen, dustbeings.
Then he bought his foreclosed city

banks, post offices, office towers.
He needed HR, accounting, supply
chain, logistics, support, IT, legal.
Everything grew once the lake shrank.
Everything empty started to fill.

John got in front of cameras, both
to eulogize the lake, and birth the mine.
The governor named what was left
Playa Michigan, and set a blue-ribbon
commission to write it into law.

The first order of business: tax breaks
for rejuvenating the “Playa Area."
John recalled an entire ecosystem
could arrive and thrive for months
on the carcass of one dead whale.

II. The Rise of the Dustmen, 2030s

There was so much lake, extra shoreline
crested in dunes, high enough for ATVs
to struggle with their angles. The “third coast”
made its own weather, its own economy,
a glass surface that gleamed from space,

from millions of lake family photos.
But the patriarch was sick with salt.
It rained less, then stopped for two years.
Folks thought they would move on,
as it shrunk and dried into memory.

As the water line dropped, detritus rose
like trash islands. He found a tommy gun,
a model T, generations of gadgets
brined sepia beneath the water. Archeology
dominated social media the summer

that his father gifted him his army shovel,
while clearing his life between coughs.
By winter, they declared the lake would not refill.
There’s new moto-cross, extreme sports
for half a lake, then a third, then dry land.

He worked one summer selling ice cream,
the next towing ATVs out of the muck.
The lakebed started into him: mineral smells
crept into his dreams, it dried like glitter,
on his shovel, his gloves, his skin, his thoughts,

so he wore a heavy-duty painter’s mask.
His father refused, he was too old for all that.
Before he succumbed, they named it White Lung,
rent prices dropped with bodies. Eventually
full face masks were required to be alive

near what was left of the lake. In the glare
of goggles it’s impossible to separate skin
and clothes from dust. It was under John’s nails,
in his hair. A dustman stops smelling,
then stops tasting anything but metallic salt.

John remembers his first day harvesting
in the mineral fields of Playa Michigan,
the Milwaukee side where blue collar
was the only work left. Tan-wrapped,
half-blind in swirls, his team hobbled

like a chain gang in a cage of sand.
The shovel, heavy that first summer,
felt light then, maybe the dust was drier,
thinner, without memory of sloughed lake.
The sunlight came through dust mist,

reflecting the porcelain white sparkles
of lithium mounds like hives of glass ants.
They used this for batteries in places
where people still wanted to live. John saw
geometry, invisible patterns to plunder.

He inspected the chunk on his shovel
that once filled sandbags for redoubts
on blasted Afghan hills for his father
and wondered what use the world
would conjure for it next.

III. The Churn, 2050

Eventually, Playa Michigan’s lithium
flesh was torn to its shallow bones.
But it was the first, not the only.
Playas multiplied, with their briny
underbellies exposed, vulnerable,

dangerous, lucrative. Dustman,
Dustwoman, Dustperson, were added
to the dictionary, then became
words of the year. John dusted off
a stable-world term, hyperscaler.

Bubbles grew with hype and hope—
that venture capital had in abundance.
Investors stretched the few avenues
left to move, swap, invert, and hide
their increasingly critical assets,

they had no choice but to make
a new god whose shadow hid portfolios.
John rose everywhere, to everyone.
Capitalism was reborn, lake mining
merged the old world, extraction,

with the new worlds’ trickle down;
predictive trading, synthetic revenue,
super frequency swaps, buy-sell
at the low-high with quantum-entangled
trading in Schrödinger’s market.

John trusted, not that it was right,
or even that it was correct, just
that he could continue following
the inexplicable patterns his mind
mapped onto lake beds, scratching

an insatiable itch. The trends were
irreversible, as the sun kept boiling
every lake, whale falls multiplied,
and desperate workers were easy
to come by and buoyed with dust jobs.

IV. The Close of Business, 2065

Sometimes you can scratch
an itch until it bleeds. Lake
effects, water husks, brine
barrens appeared worldwide,
with cheaper labor, less regs.

But the governor was a friend,
Michigan still a swing state, more
important than ever, managing
retreats across the two coasts,
Midwest and Heartland compete.

So a consortium of businesses
with guaranteed government loans
bought the company, which his
lawyers told him, by happenstance
would multiply his wealth twenty-fold.

John kept everyone on anyway.
He let them know they were running
out the clock, and eventually
shutting down, probably. He left
it at that, his aura did the rest.

It wasn’t safe to do the work anyway;
the hazmat suits he remembered
would not meet current standards.
Everyone who dug died sooner
than later. John hoped later.

V. Dusts’ End, 2072

John replaced his blood, refiltered
through horseshoe crab stem cells.
His lungs were more machine
than flesh, but John persisted
in the semitrance of old age.

While the west was left
dried out, turned crispy, charred,
the east was drowning
as tropical storms veered north,
dropped a foot of rain a day.

Water always goes somewhere.
Why not the places that used
to hold it? The third coast
was the only strip of sand
stubbornly refusing to flood.

For the first time since the fall
of Rome all hope was pinned on
aqueducts. We filled out our dead
lakes after sucking the lithium
marrow from their bones.

John spent his final years watching
the lake, different, yet the same,
wishing his dad could see it.
He pulled the shovel off the wall,
felt the shock of old muscles
pulse. Digging once more,
he placed a white oak in the hole
next to a cactus planted after
his father stopped breathing,
and wondered which of the two
would grow taller with time.

Editor's Note: Publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from Kristin Waller during our annual fundraiser.

Moosechief—Meese Who Get Into Mischief, Volume 1, is something not to be ignored. Harkin, in his unforgettable style, combines several moose (whom he refers to as ‘meese’) and mischief, cruise ships, Tom Cruise, and Khrushchev, and sets the collection on a parallel world where underwear was never invented. Relax and enjoy.

In Pillow Talk of the Dead, David Clink masterfully weaves a cycle of poems around an imagined sexual liaison between Louis Riel, Laura Secord, and Anne Shirley, as seen through the eyes of Peter Puck and Alfred Sung. If this collection is not shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, then I don’t know what.

Troy Harkin’s Cologne of the Mountain Giants gets into your grill. It takes the side of creatures who have been misunderstood throughout the millennia. Using mint leaves, lemon zest, tonka bean, amber, vanilla, cedarwood, and oak moss, Harkin lavenders in the face of death. Here is a poet whose poetry is a reflection of himself: intense, masculine, and refreshing.

Given Canadian literature’s penchant for narcissistic self-reflection, David Clink is Snow White to everyone else’s Maleficent. Like Snow White, Clink’s poetry is pure, polyphyletic, peripatetic, and phlegmatic. Also, he has a thing for cohabitating with Dwarves.

I once asked the question: Who can have vampires piloting flying saucers through the centre of planets that have water at their core? Troy Harkin can. This is poetry that matters. Period. Exclamation mark.

David Clink’s newest work, Voice Appropriation: The Dummy Speaks, is finally here. The collection comes with a dummy named Farnsworth (handcrafted and signed by the writer himself) so you may hone your ventriloquist skills while reading the poems aloud. I read it and liked it. Until Farnsworth began reciting the poems on his own.

I’ve Been Working on the Whale Road is Troy Harkin’s magnum opus. This book-length poem ponders a post-apocalyptic, magic realism future informed by moments of sadness in a world where whales have become the dominant life form and they have just finished building the first intercontinental ‘whale-way.’ A must read.

If you’re looking for a pop-up book that doubles as a Ouija board, grimoire, Vietnamese cookbook and naughty limericks for morticians then I have just the book for you. David Clink’s Smile! You’re on Memento Mori! is all of these things and so much more. David Clink is clearly not just multi-talented but omnipotent as well.

In Macho Picchu About Nothing, Troy Harkin takes familiar Shakespearean characters and puts them side-by-side with ancient aliens, an army of archaeologists, and an Archaeopteryx, interspersed with llamas, in a ground-breaking work set in the Eastern Cordillera of southern Peru. Bring your Mattock, Marshalltown Trowel, and shovel, and dig in.

Singularity: The One Word Poems of David Clink. Unsettling. Uplifting. Arousing. Carousing. Sublime.

Oh, let your dead revive!
Let corpses arise!
Awake and shout for joy,
You who dwell in the dust!
Isaiah 26:19

I awake in darkness, six feet down,
bleary from denied eternal rest.
My body rebuilds from the base of my spine
outward: vertebrae stacking, limbs sprouting,
organ and muscle and sinew and skin,
until I am whole, wrenched back to life.

Had I paid attention, had I believed
in what I’d been taught, this would not
be such a shock. I ought to have known
my blessed death would end like this:

Jerusalem calling—demanding—
fingers on puppet strings pulling me in
forcing my return to where I’ve never been.

*

Cremation was forbidden. I learned
this young, before death was real, before
I feared it, then welcomed and loved it.
My Hebrew school teacher, small and frail,
arm marked with numbers, described widows
in Europe scraping bits of bone and
tissue off cobblestone streets: pieces
of a body, a life, placed entire
in the casket, an unsolved puzzle.
My nightmares for months: red-darkened dirt,
wailing women, nails filthy with death.

The same teacher, in a cheerier tone,
said the Messiah would gather us from
our graves, lead us to olam ha-ba:
the world to come, our birthright, our home.

I, barely more than a babe, did not ask
what one thing had to do with the other.
The “Jerusalem” we sang was a metaphor,
an idea of home; not actual houses
and highways and shops and hospitals.
Not a place already populated.

I thought the “arising,” the gathering
up was a metaphor too. So much
I was not told. So much I did not
know, even in death, in the cradle
of earth, where I hoped to rest forever.

*

I’m no longer that girl who trusted
her teachers. I did not ask for resurrection;
I have no use for olam ha-bah.
I am a corpse who pines for pine, and
this world to come is no world of mine.

So I will return to ground, burrow
in search of silence, refuse to move.
I will plant myself like a flower,
scatter seeds to the wind—I will cede.

And if you too resist the callous
call, whatever parts or your body
you lay to rest beneath my petals
are welcome. Our jumbled bones, our warm
blood will nourish the dust where we dwell.
Our spines entwined, our empty eyes and
gaping grins a welcoming to the
world we made, the death we chose. And we
will say, at last and at rest, Amen.

I thought it was dead, the moth pressed against the lantern’s glass,

wings scorched to gray, body trembling like a leaf

forgetting its branch. But there it was—

a stammering of flight, a refusal to fall completely.

O ashy wings still fluttering, what do you seek

in the ruin of light, what prayer stirs from the dust

of yourself? I have known that flutter that is

not flight, but memory aching toward the thing

it once trusted, not hope, but the body refusing

to be all quiet. I promise you, some things

do not rise like fire; they crawl out

of ember, sliced-shadow, sliced-breath,

dragging their ache like ash. Once, I watched

my neighbor blow gently on a dying coal,

her breath a soft insistence: stay, stay,

even if you are no longer flame. I think of that now,

watching the moth drift sideways through

the windless room, its wings torn but still

lifting, still opening as if to say:

I am not done with this burning.

O fragile persistence, O soft ruin,

O beauty that does not need to be whole,

let no one say you didn’t try, let no one

call this anything less than survival.