Death Fugue

Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night
we drink and drink
we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie
There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes
who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
he writes it and walks from the house and the stars all start flashing he whistles his dogs to draw near
whistles his Jews to appear starts us scooping a grave out of sand
he commands us to play for the dance

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at dawntime and noontime we drink you at dusktime
we drink and drink
There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes
who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie
He calls jab it deep in the soil you lot there you other men sing and play
he tugs at the sword in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue
jab your spades deeper you men you other men you others play up again for the dance

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at dusktime
we drink and drink
there’s a man in this house your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite he cultivates snakes

He calls play that death thing more sweetly Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland
he calls scrape that fiddle more darkly then hover like smoke in the air
then scoop out a grave in the clouds where it’s roomy to lie

Black milk of morning we drink you at night
we drink you at noontime Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland
we drink you at dusktime and dawntime we drink and drink
Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland his eye is blue
he shoots you with leaden bullets his aim is true
there’s a man in this house your golden hair Margareta
he sets his dogs on our trail he gives us a grave in the sky
he cultivates snakes and he dreams Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland

your golden hair Margareta
your ashen hair Shulamite



Todesfugue


Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts
wir trinken und trinken
wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne er pfeift seine Rüden herbei
er pfeift seine Juden hervor läßt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde
er befiehlt uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich morgens und mittags wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng

Er ruft stecht tiefer ins Erdreich ihr einen ihr andern singet und spielt
er greift nach dem Eisen im Gurt er schwingts seine Augen sind blau
stecht tiefer die Spaten ihr einen ihr andern spielt weiter zum Tanz auf

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags und morgens wir trinken dich abends
wir trinken und trinken
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith er spielt mit den Schlangen
Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft
dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng

Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts
wir trinken dich mittags der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
wir trinken dich abends und morgens wir trinken und trinken
der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau
er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau
ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete
er hetzt seine Rüden auf uns er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft
er spielt mit den Schlangen und träumet der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland

dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Sulamith
 

Reprinted, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (W.W. Norton & Company, 2001)

Betwixt

                        . . . for my body does not have the same ideas I do. 
                                                     Roland Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, p. 17

The space between then and now, its crumpled, folded, damaged, rolled over qualities.  In my body with its crookedness, from all those breaks and woundings.  Mis-healings.  My shoulders rising protectively to hide me. 

I try to go to the space between and come up instead with anecdotes.  Histories.  Space between then and now, my word and their word, this word and another.  Between me and you.  Between me and the word.  Space between two people in a house with many rooms and many children.  A space in nowhere.


Wilderness.


I look through the indexes of books for the word memory.  In the index of the book called Hysteria I do not find memory, but find instead, mind-fucking, on p.149.  This is of course irresistible.  Anastasia’s mind is her sex object, the paragraph which contained mind-fucking begins.  This too is irresistible. 

I like to keep a kind of distance.  But I carry around with me a book I have never read entitled The Failing Distance.  It is about Ruskin.  It must be the title I cling to, as I have no particular interest in Ruskin. 

There was a book in my parents’ bookcase that fascinated me as a child.  It was called Memories of an Aphasiac.  But now I realize I remember the title wrong.  The correct one is Memories of an Amnesiac.  I never read it.

My grandparents, at my grandfather’s wish, wrote a book in which their respective memoirs were intertwined.  Its title was Damit Wir Nicht Vergessen.  Another book I never read.  The English title, which was not published, was to be Lest We Forget.

Later my grandfather got Alzheimers and remembered nothing.


(((((((((((remorse.  from re-mords.  to bite again.)))))))))))



Joan Harvey's fiction, poetry, and translations have appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Otoliths, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Tampa Review, Bomb, Another Chicago Magazine, Danse Macabre, Osiris, Global City Review, Mountain Gazette, A Trunk of Delirium, Noua Literatura, Pangolin Papers, Inkblot, Prism, Kindred Spirit, Blue Light Red Light, Mississippi Mud, To: A Journal of Poetry, Prose and The Visual Arts, Fiction Monthly, Between C & D (Penguin anthology), Worcester Review, and others. She has won prizes for both poetry and fiction, and has been read on the radio in Manhattan and Aspen, Colorado. She is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and has translated the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann.

Monochrome man

hugged my mother once at the bottom of stairs in between doorway and hall. She didn’t see his gentle pressing. I see him through thick time.  When my son was three, he bled. Blood-blister in his throat emptied red threads onto sheets. Man’s sheer sleeve absorbs. When my son was four, the babysitter spoke little English, watched too many children. End of hall, babies cried in a room stuffed with brown, wooden cribs. Clear plastic couches in her living room. Toddler gate my son pounded each morning, man tending to his ache. In kindergarten my son learned Spanish but couldn’t make letters on pages stay still. Man caught little-boy vowels in his collar, helped consonants dissolve: black salt in thick, pale hands pressed together lightly, fingertips pointing.

In the shower I cried, water pelting my chest, colorless, shapeless, molding into monochrome, the indefinite pulling me away.  Man folded me along the edges, like fresh linen mother placed in dresser drawers, his soft eyes urging me beyond the weight.



The Music of Dead Hands

rests
            silent overtones of the past cushion the fingers
huddled like fleshy sticks ready for a bonfire
or maybe the earth: a dark, wet baritone.

You wait for a beat, slight hint of flux,
what syncopated memories feel like against white cloth,
pristine maple edges,
        the force of thought:
what limbs are before arteries fill
with disinfectant.

repeats
        the similar alignment of muddy wrists,
a likeness among death in coffins,
hands folded just below the waist in unison,
or maybe a leitmotif: calm persona
amid parallels of grief.

You wait for a variation, faint twist of harmony
from knuckles muffled in wood or steel:
unfinished symphonies,
        what ache sounds like.

resolves
        a room full of dead hands in hydrogel,
fingertips stiff amid indefiniteness.

You peer through the large glass wall,
wait for the air’s rush and pitch,
        or maybe applause: strong dance of palms,
a rippling dissonance,
then suspension: a final holding
of clay, the mind’s last form of whole,
        each hand a slow, waving cadence.




Theresa Senato Edwards' first book of poems Voices Through Skin will be published June 2011 by Sibling Rivalry Press. Works from this have been published online at Atticus Books, Pirene’s Fountain, and Touch: The Journal of Healing. Other poems appear in Boxcar Poetry Review's second print anthology (2010) and online at Stirring, Press 1, decomP, Clean Sheets, Chronogram, and elsewhere. Edwards works on a second ms titled “Painting Czeslawa Kwoka ~ Honoring Children of the Holocaust,” a collaboration with Lori Schreiner. Work from this can be found online at AdmitTwo, Autumn Sky Poetry, elimae, and Trickhouse. She teaches literature and tutors writing at Marist College and is founder/editor/publisher of Holly Rose Review.

A Milky Taste

Little boy I could eat you. Swallow you
whole, pick your nails from the gaps
in my teeth.  I’d spit on you, let my hair
float, a woolen mop. Feel tears ooze
out of my skin. The water of my chest,
a set of rulers, will snap across your
knuckles, make them swell up blue.
I laugh at the hand of cards lying
on the wooden table. You lost, with
the cows, our green wedding rings, to
your brother in a barn. Your mouth,
a jagged key, cuts my cheek, I could
scream at the moon nailed in black.
Little boy, drink your milk and kiss me,
the coyotes howl tonight, I can hear
the chickens fuss from my window.



Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza poet from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Juárez, México. She is an  MFA candidate at the University of New Mexico in poetry and will be the new poetry co-editor for Blue Mesa Review.

Ian

“His funeral was on the other side of the country.” That is the first thing he says.

“He used to look up at the marbled skies and get dizzy. His focus would eventually come to rest on the worms writhing in the brown earth at his toes.”

That is the second thing he says. He says this to put a poetic spin on things. But now he seems sick of his oft-repeated summary and makes his way out past the stares and sympathy pats.

Stepping outside the building, he meanders in the warm wind, breezing along him and flapping his undone shirt-tails and pocketed black tie. But his careless body language is betrayed by the intensity of expression on his face. The semi-detached houses have an artificial feel to them. A lack of substance.

He comes to number 23 and walks up the slabbed walkway, he avoids the gaps for luck. He reaches the door, knocks and then remembers.

He’s not here anymore.

He takes a key out of his pocket and unlocks the door.

Once inside he sits. From the red sofa he can see the front and back entrance. The front door has a stained glass representation of a setting sun and the back door has a mish-mash of colourful panes. He wanted it this way so the sun would shine colourfully down on them. It didn't work. The house is positioned in such a way that the sun shines briefly in the morning through the stained glass and once again around three. In the long late afternoons, in the mouthwash drinking mornings, on the multiple grey days, in the sighing evenings of card castles and cryptic crosswords, the colours just stayed dull and dark. Now it's dust and dark.

What he remembers most is the grouting. He remembers picking at it wide eyed listening to Ian. Those thick lines veining the short sharp twice daily burst of colour. How awe-inspiring they seemed to him, how familiar they seem now.

Brightness veined with darkness. Brightness now greyed and with black veins pulsing through with doubtless and sincere intensity.

He remembers Ian whispering into his slumbers.

He lies sprawled out on the red sofa, his legs angling uncomfortably over the edge and smokes a cigarette. Smoke hovers about him wrapped in stillness. He lies soaking in the mushy smell of old wood and heavy memories.


*

He has been here for three days. Following a trail of empty bottles, which have become receptacles for his cigarette ash, you would come upon him in the loft conversion.

The bottle at his side has a halo of ash, etched by his drunken state. He grumbles about not remembering where he's left the ashtray he'd made as a child.

It was like an oyster shell, he mutters, the concave surface fine and smooth, the convex worn and jagged. He'd put some putty on the bottom to stabalise it and used vermillion nail varnish to paint the convex.

He trails off and falls off into a slumber. A crimson bubble erupts from the corner of his mouth and slides down his chin on a trail of spit. He lies flat on his back upon his tatami bed; his head propped up by a plush, pottery green pillow. The cold white wall behind is lined with porcelain cherubs clumsily painted green. They rise diagonally from his side of the bed.

His hand reaches out and pats the other side of the bed. Feeling nothing he tucks it back into his pocket. He then turns on his side. The TV plays on in the corner of the room and the open window on the downward sloped ceiling is leaving a slowly darkening rectangular mark on the carpet.

His eyes are closed, his body is still but he’s awake. His pupils flutter under quivering eyelids as he attempts to move but feels himself pinned down. He attempts to stretch out of himself but is dragged back by the pressure. His altered state encases him in a fleshy cage. Or maybe it's just very realistic shadow-play.


*

He was woken up, candy-floss mouthed and burkaed in hangover, by John knocking at the door.

John convinced him to go for a drink and a talk.

He was made painfully aware of his pityful state, as well as the house’s, by John’s retrousé nose shivering with disdain at the accumulated stench of stagnation, by John’s darting eyes feasting on the cumulative misery.

He excused himself a moment, within a cough and left John hovering in the hall. He rushed up the creaking wooden steps and entered the bathroom. He exposed his gums and teeth to the mirror, frothed mouthwash, then ruffled his hair and pinched his cheeks. He then creaked his way back downstairs where John had distracted his prying eyes with a Private Eye Compendium.

As they sat in the café, he felt what little he could slip out of him, down the sides of the brown plastic chairs and over the laminated table. Words seemed to mist out and padded in swathes of cotton.

John orders two teas.

“Sugar?” the waitress asks John.

“Sugar?” John asks him turning away from the waitress. He nods.

“Sugar” He says turning back to her.

“Righty-ho. Two sugars.”

They sit in silence. She comes back and places the cups on the edge of the table in front of John.

“There you go sweetie. Your sweet teas”. She guffaws at their meek smiles.

“So how are you?” asks John. The question gloops out of him.

He looks at John, puts his head in his hands and starts spasming with sobs.

John places his hand on his shoulder.

“Listen, he was unhappy. He was very unhappy. There was nothing to be done. We're here to help you Isaac”

Isaac looks up at John.

“You don’t understand. He was my world.”

John lets out a long sigh.

“He was my idol.” Issac continues.


Benoît Du Cann was born at St Mary's Paddington, London in 1987. He is of French Catalan descent. He now lives in Barcelona where he teaches English and French. Other work of his has been published in Ignavia Press and in the upcoming issues of Kerouac's Dog Magazine.

The Next Man

On her way home from work, Evelyn Abingdon tripped over a tooth on the sidewalk.  It was as long and thin as her pinkie finger, a fang of some sort, she figured as she tested its sharp tip against the meaty pad of her thumb.  She pictured all the fang-toothed animals she knew and concluded it must be an alligator's tooth.  Or perhaps a crocodile’s.  She'd never been able to determine the difference between the two.

Evelyn Abingdon didn't think it was wise to leave such a sharp tooth out on the sidewalk so she brought it home and that night as she readied herself for sleep, she slipped it beneath her pillow.  What could it hurt, she thought as she fell into a dream.


When she awoke the next morning, Evelyn Abingdon found a man lying next to her in bed.  "Good morning," he said as he stretched his arms up toward the ceiling, turning his hands at the wrists as if to make sure all his fingers were still in place.  His hands were lovely: long-fingered, pink tipped, and clean.  Evelyn Abingdon slid her own stubby hand up under her pillow, though she already knew she would find nothing there.  Indeed, the tooth was gone and here was a man in its place.  The man turned and smiled a wide grin and Evelyn was relieved to find that his teeth were of a uniform and normal size with no gaps or missing large fangs. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of her armchair where the man had laid out his clothes.  For a brief moment, she thought that there was another man sitting there, a very neatly dressed flat man and Evelyn wondered what on earth she would do with two men.  But as she turned to look more closely, she was relieved to realize there wasn't a second man, especially since she wasn't quite sure what to do about the first man yet.  A second man would be too much, an embarrassment of riches, she thought.  Besides, there had been only one tooth.

The first man sprang from the bed and began pulling himself into the clothes from the chair.  Evelyn closed her eyes just enough to allow her to watch through the fringe of her lashes.  He was a tall man, well-built and hairless, with no long tail nor rough scales of any kind.  She wanted to touch him, but thought that perhaps it was too soon.  She did not know the protocol for this sort of meeting.

As Evelyn readied herself for work, the first man bustled around in the kitchen.  "Breakfast is essential, is it not?" he asked as he tipped milk into her coffee.  She preferred her coffee black, but as it was their first morning together, she thought it best not to complain.  Better to get off on the right foot, she thought, and quickly glancing down, she was happy to see what large feet he had, his toes all in a perfectly proportioned row.  She rushed through her work day, excited to see what that evening would hold.


That first night, the first man was everything she'd hoped for and more.  This is what happens when you wish upon a fang, Evelyn thought as she raked her nails across his smooth back.  Thank god she had found such a strong and sizable tooth.  What firm hands, what fine wrists, and ah, those lips, that clean and shiny hair!  As she drifted in half-sleep, Evelyn wondered if elsewhere there were women like her with men sprung fully-formed from fangs found on the city sidewalks.  She hoped so, for their sake, though she had no idea how she would explain any of this to her mother.   

But within the week, the first man began making changes--the positioning of the pillows on the bed, the way he folded back the sheet, a different roast of coffee bean, the meat cooked well-done and then, to Evelyn's dismay, not at all.  Instead blocks of tofu quivered on her plate surrounded by fronds of dark seaweed.  "Think of your arteries," he said when she protested.  "I don't want to wose you."

"Did you say 'wose'?  Are you baby-talking me now?" she demanded to know.  It was all too much, this fang-man baby-talking her.

"Of course not siwwy," he said with a coy smile.


That night Evelyn took her pillow and her blanket and slept on the couch.

"Sweep tight," the first man called to her from the bedroom before he switched off the light.

"Screw you," Evelyn shouted back, her voice swallowed up in the darkness.

   
The next evening, on her way home from work, Evelyn Abingdon stubbed her toe against a short rib on the sidewalk.  It curved against the palm of her hand and ran from the tip of her middle finger to her wrist, gnawed clean of its meat, the yellow bone notched rough with tooth marks.  She slipped it into her pocket, closing her fingers tight around the bone and holding it to her side as she walked.

The first man had dinner waiting on the table when she came in.  Something leafy and steamed.  She set the bone down on the table between them as she picked up her fork.  She didn't bother to wash her hands, the heady scent of the bone masking the mustardy tang of her meal.  "It's delicious," she said with a tight smile.

"And so vewy vewy good for you, is it not?" the first man replied.  Evelyn watched with satisfaction how he stared at the bone but did not ask.

That night, as they settled into bed, Evelyn slid the bone into place beneath her pillow. 

"Do you think that's wise?" the first man asked.  Evelyn ignored him and gave her pillow another pat before pressing her cheek into place.  She was tired of the first man's rhetorical questions.  The next man would be better, she hoped.  He’d belch and fart and slouch in his seat.  She would twine her fingers through his rough pelt, put braids in his thick hair.

They would eat their meat rare; they’d tear it lustily from the bone.



Julie Innis's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Gargoyle, Pindeldyboz, and BLIP, among others.

Hyperventilation

Friday, I stopped breathing.
I told myself: you have
written before.  You will write again.
Start with one true sentence.
I thought of my mother’s answering machine:
Clinical social worker and psychotherapist.
If this is a psychiatric emergency
please hang up and dial 9-1-1
or go to your nearest hospital emergency room.
No one can commit you unless you make a threat.
Even crazys have rights.
You will write again.
I can skate better than most of the planet
which makes me feel published.
Something no one knows about me is
I see myself like Botticelli’s Venus:
modest but unapologetic, with a dash
of unapologetic sexuality,
but I hear myself saying I’m sorry
I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry
I’m sorry you love me, because I’ve fooled you,
because I don’t see what there is to love
while I’m seeing myself birthed from the sea
riding a scallop shell.  That’s cocky narcissism,  
a category in the DSM IV. Commit me.
I’ll make a threat: I’ll write again.
How’s that for violence?
My pride, my skating, my sharp and biting edges.
One true sentence: I hate because I love
and I love despite the hate.


Boricuas


San Juan, the green stucco façade of St. Elizabeth’s Presbyterian Hospital. Close-up on yellow and blue birth certificates in Spanish.

Mr. & Mrs.:
You two were born blonde
(one with a blue foot,
         an umbilical accident),
two years
and three months
apart.  Each time,
the enfermeras tried
to pierce your ears.

Cut away to a banana tree next to a pool.  Coquis chirp with the coming night.

Bluefoot & Blondie:
We descended from WASPs
wearing nothing
but water wings
and sun bonnets
and diapers.
You:
partial ex-pats,
but we:
Boricuas.

In the foreground, a snowman outside a Tudor house in a New Jersey suburb.  Through a window, the family eating rice and beans.



Brookes Moody is an MFA candidate at The New School. Her work has previously been published in The Northern New England Review and Playground Journal.

Extended Journey to the Afghan Sink

Years later you cross the Persian-Afghan border. Long ago you had a trajectory and an objective, but you cannot remember them. Sometimes the sky clears, the sun is pale, and the rubble and stone of the desert shine with a silver tint. On other days the mist descends, like thinning milk, and the rocks at your feet are transparent.

Your legs are still strong, bounding up the hills of gravel. You often feel weightless, like the air were pulling you up from the hips, and you cross the landscape in huge strides, the earth skipping past your feet. But there are times when you feel weak, and you cannot bear to rise in the morning, cannot even lift your face from the dirt. When finally you do, your muscles groan and you grimace and cough and mutter at the sky.

Your wrist-watch is useless, its mechanism rotted. The clock-hands jerk against grains of dirt. Still you travel, and weeks pass. A goat-like animal comes out from the mist, groaning and babbling at the sight of you. It follows you a while, trotting behind you and licking your calves. But by sundown the creature is nowhere to be seen.

A month goes by. In the afternoon you spot travelers up ahead. Soon you are passing them, two young boys, mouths hidden in their scarves. When they see you they stop, all four eyes fixed upon your watch. You remove the watch and offer it to them. One boy snatches it and runs away downhill, shrieking like a bird, and the other quickly follows. You wince and continue. The priority is to travel faster.

The hills spread and flatten as you enter the steppe. There are sounds far up in the desolate sky, the blurting of animals, some kind of howling, the acoustics of hell. At night you sit for hours and shiver in the dark. You realise that your journey has entered a period of decline. But haven't you been deteriorating for years? Even when you set out from the beaches of Cataluña, even then your eyes were misted, your shoes damp. You think all this while the sun is rising, as you gaze out into the vacuum. There is nothing, not even evil, in the gormless sky or the broken clay.

But soon you feel a breeze, and a fruity smell lifts your nose. The sun thaws and gleams on your skin. Ahead, white clouds nest in the turquoise skyline. The earth seems moist, there are patches of moss, and around them swirl a few flies. You are among hills again, tufts of grass spring from the ground, and ants march to the drumming crickets. You run forward as a horrible shiver shakes your breath: you have realised where you are going, and that you are almost there. A hundred feet ahead are fields of poppies, all pinkish white. Their tall stems sway in the glitter of water drops, stretching so far that they dye the horizon.

Now you walk among the poppies. The height of your waist, they tickle your fingers and slide up your knees. How you could sink into the earth with these flowers, grab them, suck them, swim and starve until you fell. You stop and gaze around, swooning, scratching your head, trying to remember what brought you to this place. Because we both know you have been here before.


Conan McMurtrie was born in Malaysia, and grew up itinerantly in South-East Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Spain. He later studied physics and music at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Last summer, his short story A Walk Before Santa Soledad was shortlisted for the Momaya Press Award, and, more recently, his fiction received a commendation in the Aesthetica Creative Works Annual. He currently lives in London.

Having Already Left Point A


We ride, O yes this is what we do. We ride
in my car on the peripheral rock of interstate
and with your countenance you intimate     
that you think I (the beloved) should die.
Thrusting into the golden Nogal Canyon, we ride
in decaying silence and catch blurs of arroyos. I say
nothing, watch a sunset corrode the same way
that your smiles do. Sweet Jesus, we ride.

But I would make a great corpse. Bloated
sunrays jab, their sting pervasive.
You rub the dusty dashboard
and smear the mess on my hardening head.
I am a novice traveler: I still somehow live
and dabble in a desert of flash-forward.



American Gothic


            It is true that I have not been able to utter more than a madman’s sound since my eyes beheld             the sight. I’ve lost speech. And so they have asked me to write. Since you are a poet, write, they             told me. Little do they know what they might get. Little, even, do I.
                                                                                    -William Goyen, “In the Icebound Hothouse”

Grief works in mysterious ways—you didn’t really die.

St. Patrick’s Day. I came home to pee
and there you were, blue and wrinkled. Well,
grandma’s dead. I turn you over, trying somehow
to imagine your spasms and twitching head
as signs of life. Your tendons relax, and then stiffen.

(It is April Fool’s Day, and the Japanese
Maples are gleaming green below pigeons
resting on power lines and Mulberry trees)

The Fourth of July arrives, grandma. Your son
chases your granddaughter on Seacliff beach, Santa Cruz.
The sky is blue of course, as is the ocean. Blue
blue blue blue all fucking blue and then there’s you
as my sister overturns a clump of kelp.


Adam Crittenden is working on an MFA at New Mexico State University and editing for Puerto Del Sol. He teaches freshman composition and has recently taught a poetry course for the local Community Education program.