Give it new life, I thought, the wrecked house, the apple orchard. Camped on the edge of the property, I’d wrapped myself in a wool blanket. Deer hoofed through the thick field, snapped fallen limbs a few yards from where I slept. Down the road lived a goat named Festus, and when we met I stared into his orange eyes. His shelter was pitiful, a small plastic dome he ducked into when it rained. Soon after, the house was mine. Neighbors turned out with pies and advice, and fresh eggs laid by geese and bantam hens. I tried to eat everything before it spoiled. Cleared the brush, peeled back layers of neglect, while Festus stayed chained to a metal spike in the ground, walking in circles, wearing down the frozen grass to bare mud.
Even in August, a chill. Boxes stacked on the painted pine floor. Sheets pulled over the wingbacks, the sofa. The door closed after letting in the last of the room’s good air.
Years ago I burned here. Brought him into the near dark. Held his hands while he breathed in my hair, passed it between his lips.
A Wyeth print hangs on the wall now, farmers scything the fields, a late-summer mowing. It means almost nothing, you know how it is, the image passed into scenery, or shadows, years ago.
But here, once, he held me, his arms around my body, my arms reflecting his own, linked to him. It seemed that we were endless.
On this, the last night of summer, I sleep on a cot next to an open screen and am soaked by the night rain.
about your wings by Jacqueline Kolosov
Moral gravity makes us fall toward the heights – Simone Weil white as the tundra swan magnificent— into un- tethered sky we plunge tempestuous visions fledge into birds what can one do to ascend lower? surrounding us stars bright as sorrow why then this blood? why this gravity these talons?
Hush by Jacqueline Kolosov
Nothing is the force which renovates the world – Emily Dickinson This mare who abides within. She is sculptural, fleet. This mare of ebony mane and tail
whose brow bears a white star, the kind a child’s hand
might make, one white streak in a body resembling night.
This mare is the pasture’s stillness whose eye contains the depths
of Baltic amber, gold thread of iris, thorn, crown, bitterest tears.
The wind may gust, and here on the high plains it does gust,
as it gusts in Damascus and Aleppo, though I doubt there is silence there.
Why can we not remember the feathered fall of angels,
the way the desert remembers the history of wind, weightless, mute.
In ancient times keening gave shape to grief. Bodies swayed and rocked.
Tell me, mare of the white star, tail like the quill
with which God wrote His book into being, is He still writing it now
so many children, wolf-eyed, hungry, have ceased to speak
while poppies bloom through the bones of the dead?
You, oh mare, can withstand wind sharp as shards.
Help us, I beg you, to remember our names.
The North Atlantic Right Whale by Jacqueline Kolosov
In death they float, and so became known as the “right” whales. Escalating now, their vanishing. By day the remaining few brave ships, nets. Ahab said the eyes
define the face of man. What of a whale’s eyes? Theirs capture the light, too. Yet these great beings know what is visible only within the dark, surfaces and depths. Today the right whales numbers are three hundred. When their eyes close, two portals remain open. How we see, we know. But how little, how very little do we know.
Broken Words by Barrett Ahn
Shakes hand shakes head long journey before words out of mouth (use hands and eyes to convey meaning wave around gesture frantically be emphatic on the tones I know)
Broken rice broken sounds understand? no cocks head, smiles shy (next time, plan to bring my young, fluent niece)
Points to map points to self attempts new phrase, hangs in air too loud but repeats maybe hearing issues (realize the stranger has no hearing issues know he just can’t decipher the foreign blanket under which the question hides)
Gives up gives chance to another sighs in relief as stranger switches to language from home (gestures are no longer necessary) found someone familiar in foreign city.
Of leaving: nothing ever lasts but odd habits and those rancid bits of love’s lonely power grid held hostage. Having survived blasts of rage, battered enthusiasts patch their holes and hope to mend. Did you ever observe an eyelid twitch from the inside? We outcasts share these tales. I unlock the door, step out into rain. How easy to forget what we’ve lost, what we’ve never held. I will sweep the floor, wash dishes, cook, pick up debris, set it aside, regret, heal. Grieve.
So I Am Little by Hasham Khalid
And madness is like a discus bolting and tearing the space with burgeoning circumference. I have kept my little And in keeping my little, found all that is little is like me. All that looks curious, All that keeps waiting. How patient I am in my vigil, At the sorrow of the things passing. How sane in my knowledge of our shrinking, As time leaves us. Let me be glitter on your skin Or the sunlight clasping your spine As the ringing voice of early morning, Wakes the earth. Here I have found in your scent in your clumsiness, My own body made into a flower. Call this thing love, Our mooring in the littleness of each other.
A Personal Guide to Forced Displacement by Daniel Nemo
“No human being should be deprived of his metaxu, that is to say of those relative and mixed blessings (home, country, traditions, culture, etc.) which warm and nourish the soul and without which, short of sainthood, a human life is not possible.” – Simone Weil
Let us rest a little. There is much to take in here. After a long process of disintegration, rootedness.
The life instinct gives off sparks
flashover of pure form before it breaks free without recall.
Art is the conductor–
across space and time and life and death.
To break free will take a lifetime.
A lifetime is a form of flammable cladding growing anxious to ingest the oxygen in cavity walls. The blaze burrows through at length
and eats away at it, as a blaze would. Art is the conductor, memory the meeting place.
Tilted at the sharp end of the passage- way were they a voiceless chorus in a vessel being filled
the same memories would turn up the self- same passageway.
Send in all personal inquiries and sit tight, it’s just a matter of investigative procedure.
And wait and wait, for nothing to happen.
Channels open in the membrane of the nerve cell.
Human breath collection apparatus in sensorial space–
I’d like to ask moreover what dead book fiction was used to shroud, to mask everyone’s spirit of discernment so completely–
Is it true there isn’t a valve to shut off the flow of that blue smoke in here
the outlet pressure’s going to exceed 1000 kPa and someone may choke to death
before they iron out eventual bugs and safety flaws and add new self-correcting features, and whatever that piece is
that’s dislodged in me might, and why not, cant round chasing after whom to blame
bordered in again
internalized, for all intents and purposes, like a compression field stretched across a nexus of events.
Time’s up, foster a rapid decision.
Foster, for what it’s worth, an image,
a destination.
Not the kind one feels confined to as in a stray subway car buzzing round an unlit tunnel darkly packing hours deep inside the hourglass
but a harbor of pursuit, a transplant of the will to believe no less desirous than habitual, habitually a size too large.
Because the first act of war is feeling small.
Crawl-spaced and halved by borders and not so infrequently punished for crossing borders. Flux.
[Reflux.]
Can you hear me.
It’s just like old times.
I left my self in the old quarters, a boy gliding in and out of the brickwork forever ushering new tenants in, hanging on for dear life, having only been taught hate.
I left to see how far I’d come–
When I looked back I was a navigational hyperlink, collapsed, light at nightfall the final sight to mark my progress,
all initial and ulterior installments of escapement born out of a mere change of direction
not unlike an experience not fully formed yet– conjoined at the root by their own function or, perhaps, lack thereof.
Which brings to mind the story of the dissident poet with bad teeth surviving prison.
‘His teeth survived prison?’
‘Finis vitae sed non amoris,’ he’d say, soon all things perish as approximated
simply to reveal traces in a case of evidence without clues
as from a swift underwater explosion
during which for the subject to be transformed it must initially be stowed at the center of its vulnerability, it, the subject,
and then propelled, albeit later than ever, high into the air, ridiculously majestic–
Into making a farewell appearance
on a narrow ledge surrounded by its counterparts, pain and beauty–
To see the object of universal contemplation in the flashing eye-ball in the sky
reflecting, upside down, the seeing of events, the natural enemy territory the sweet guillotine mends dreams for the unloved in.
Hard to know when to stop, having arrived into the world head first, anonymously, the next place beside the last, so few crossing rafts.