Dane Lyn

Sacramental Surrealism

(after “The Toy” by Alessandro Sicioldr)

do tin horses dream? do 
they contemplate their 
mortality, write riddles 
where time is broken down 
and rearranged, minutes 
become marbles spread out 
across cracked asphalt. a 
ritualistic rewind to reward 
the faithful. 

do tin horses complete 
sacraments? how do they
define worship? do they 
look at the god-like creatures 
that handle them as
benevolent divinity? pray 
to them? challenge them to 
read the fortunes hidden in 
the cracks?

Editor’s note: View “The Toy (Il Giocattolo)” at the painter’s website:
http://www.sicioldr.com/2021.html

Tide Pulsed 

I am free. pain washes
away as ears fill–sound
filtered through water.
each joint unbound, cursed
connective tissues slacken.
Damona, ocean goddess,
my healer, I call to you,
my feet buried in
tide-pulsed sand—cleanse
me of my woe.

Benjamin Schmitt

Sunset Boulevard

I was in the mood for a classic tonight
so I thought I’d give Sunset Boulevard a shot
in case you haven’t seen the movie
it begins with the writer Joe Gillis
basically replacing the dead chimp
that aging star Norma Desmond once cuddled with
so typical of writers
defeated by empty page and empty stomach
thinking life in a cage a victory
down and out Joe becomes Norma’s lover
which is kind of weird
not least of all because he is played by William Holden
who would have a fictitious affair
with a young Faye Dunaway
decades later in Network
in a kind of mirror image of Joe and Norma’s relationship
which proves that the sun melting the ice
is the same sun that allows it

But in Sunset Boulevard Gloria Swanson
steals the show as Norma Desmond
an art nouveau painting brought to life
by Dr. Frankenstein
the one true American monster
a skull chewing its way through dirt for celebrity
outside Norma’s mansion
the ambition of Joe’s friends is a kind of innocence
not the necklace of cynically sparkling champagne glasses
Norma offers to him
and so Joe has to make a choice
maybe it’s one that we all have to make eventually
to be honest I’m still not sure what I would choose
the purity of obscurity
or the shame that fame will spotlight

Presence

God I feel
Your presence in Your absence
Your hope in my utter despair
sorry about last night
I bit down HARD
teeth clenched on a certain kind of madness

I’ve read enough Marc
us Aurelius to know I’m not a
stoic
but only a fool would fail to notice the hurts from spermhood to
manhood I’ve only known a series of moments pouring down on
landscapes from clouds that no one could see yet You know who
sat here on this bench before and who will sit after so there must
be a reason for this chthonic muck swishing through me

But I don’t even know why
a hu manface
can make me angry or morose
or why the sound of a word
elicits a giggle
these days
my life itself
seems presumptuous
so please forgive
all my cursing over

This lightbulb left on in an empty room
this rage crawling in terror to the womb

that waits

Martha Johnson

Aeschylus and My Brother

Yesterday I received a letter from my brother.
My sister-in-law perished a year ago. Leukemia.
Her death was swift and unexpected. He had
her body cremated and spread her ashes
by the pond on their farm. She loved the pond,
especially at sunset.

He apologized. “I couldn’t control my feelings
for two days.” [I understood. In our family
emotions were not permitted. That piece of the
human puzzle was torn to bits, burnt to ashes
and tossed out with the trash.]

He said he researched “leukemia” for cerebral,
objective documentation. Even in his sleep
the pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop
upon his heart. He dreams. By the pond
her ashes dry his tears.

Tamas Dobozy

Corked

March in the grey earth, driving north into Perth County. A cloud of birds startled from a ditch,
and a sudden inexplicable memory for my dead father. His face in that weather, late winter. His
gaze across the landscape. His preference for dead seasons and nothingness. Then the birds
trying to reverse into the bottleneck from which they burst, each one spun out alone,
disconnected from the rest.

Cartoon Heads

There are foxes in our neighborhood. You see them in mid-afternoon, zigzagging across lawns
and driveways and patios as if none of our boundaries existed—no property lines, traffic lights,
civic ordnances—as if it was all the same traversable surface. One of them chases a squirrel
across the street. Two of them watch me curiously, like I’m wild and wandered in, then vault a
five foot fence on their odd, levered back legs. A third one trots through the yard at noon, lifts
her nose into our mailbox, scenting our bouquet of lettermail.
Molly asks if I’d like to find their den. She is one of my twin daughters, delivered by c-
section, premature, at twenty-eight weeks, weighing one pound eleven ounces. The doctors
took us aside and recommended (though in not so many words) despair, she probably wasn’t
going to live, then they couldn’t figure out how she did, through some unkillable energy
medical science hasn’t the instruments to detect, much less measure.
Sure, let’s go, I say.
We put on our shoes and walk through the meadow behind our house. Molly has always
been unknown to me, right from the moment of birth, too small to survive the way she did, too
tightly packed to emit information, her gravity swallowing up what light you might cast on or
hope to recover from her. These days, when I see her, she’s drawing pictures on her iPad,
always the same cartoon head—no eyes, nose or hair, in monochrome washes of blue or red,
its face imprinted with an invented script I can’t read. Who are these people of hers? When did
they arrive? Is she preparing for the day she’ll meet them? Molly continues drawing, hours
every day, sealed in a privacy she’s carried since birth.
We find the foxes den where Molly said it would be, where a friend from school told her
it was, behind a storage facility, where the foxes have dug a burrow under the bright orange
sheds. We grip the chainlink fence, we don’t see any adults, but three kits sit on the pavement,
watching us in return. They look bored, preparatory, as if waiting for instructions from us,
though I’m not sure what I’d tell them even if I could speak the language I hear, some nights in
the brush, chittering and screeching.
The ground around our feet is littered with the leftovers of their meals—bits of rabbit
fur, a torn-off pigeon wing, bones of mice, squirrels, moles, in a pattern that seems both
careless and unique. Molly examines it for meaning, I watch her lips move, forming words so
quietly she seems to be competing with the breeze. I make out the words for magic, broken
circle, relics, but it’s nonsense, I’ve invented them, fitting her noise to my meaning. There’s a
violence in how intently I listen, trying to catch the last notes off her lips, desperate to know
what she thinks, until I feel the concentration, the effort, mark itself on my face.
Molly stares at what’s there, script and color, saving it for her index of possible
alphabets. She does not know what it says. But she reads it back to me.

On the Late Interest in Genealogy

My father gathered pictures of the dead. We found them in a box in his old walnut desk. Photos
of them at seasides, the back gardens of Eastern European backwaters, road trips to Mexico
City for cheap artifacts and whores. He had an anecdote for all of them. This was our great-
aunt, Ester De Jong, on my mother’s side of the family, married to a Wouverman, from
Amsterdam, possibly related to the painter Philips Wouverman, who’s hanging in the Louvre.
There was a letter from the poet Hinkta, though it’s lost now, family lore, saying he was
working on a sonnet for this woman, my great-grandmother, Beatrice Nissy, never finished,
never delivered, not found among the dead poet’s papers. This is the logging camp at Nimpkish
were I worked, ’58 or ’59, where the river overflowed and we drifted until daybreak, asleep, on
our air mattresses. These are photos of the portraits, in oil, of the male line of the Carinnis my
godfather kept in his house in Perth, the earliest from 1768, it’s too bad they couldn’t afford
better artists, look at how bad those hands are painted, like two lumps of dough. I’m sure he
could feel it too as he talked, the room filling with boredom, the irrelevance he thrashed
against, amassing his photographs. He could see it on our faces, desperate to get out of there,
to avoid all mention, and treated us, accordingly, like captive enemies—because we were the
agents of forgetting, of oblivion, because we swept all those people into the abyss—and also
because he wasn’t training us to be archivists, but for our own late days of desperation, those
final years of fighting the undertow. It wasn’t about the photographs, the ancestors, the
anecdotes, it was about exactitude, discipline, focus, the dismantling of terror. I can still see it
in his photograph, the photographs I’ve collected of him since he died, in the box on my desk,
his face grainy with the con of keeping track, the cheap trick of a counterfeit life still in
circulation, its forgers clinging to it as if they’d created the real thing.

HR Harper

A Chant of Choice

The brotherhood wakes to a bell tuned to middle C.

The habits are strong this morning—
those voices carried so long natter on
and slam familiar doors and deny the greater
strength of these trees and seasons
and the singing of the hours. Cosmogenesis and entropy
both clear their throats. The sound
of the universe self-creating does not kid around.

So I raise a white flag
to the very crowns of the trees
that circle my home.

Perhaps in last night’s dream
I learned to surrender to habits,
and I received a transmission that helps:
the voices between my ears—
no longer close anything. Every sound is a door.
What once was less is now more.

But let’s be honest, I got kicked out of the Brotherhood
and I say good morning to coffee and self-cherishing,
my addictions of choice.

I do not doubt
the power of capitulation
the value of setting matters on the soapstone counter,
marmalade and mortality aligned for one more time,
one last time as though there were time left.

It’s another morning of monkeys
left on my back, chipper in the cortex—
the chatter of the universe fixing its mistakes
off key and amused by the filters awarded us.

What I want to tell you is that loving these habits
opens doors. Look at the world
that’s left through today’s threshold.
It is a green song stretching
glittering particles of union
across an inland sea.
A green song that yearns for
the very skin of black holes.
And it is also a shrug
on tired shelf-life shoulders.

Do a little stretching every morning.
Practice your scales.
Watch for falling branches.

This is the lesson learned every morning:
infinite darkness and eternal light
grow tall from one root,
flow from the same spring,
and both sing a song of no limits.

And, oh, the root is not theory.
My bones are a pitch pipe.
My throat, though passing,
whistles with what might have been possible.
Today begins.

Ken Been

The Landline at the Old Cottage They Sold Me

I.
I heard the landline ringing on the kitchen wall
a moon surface that wasn't scraped and sanded
just painted over like a tel
imperfections having said their piece
well before ol' Pete had rolled out a spread of tulip yellow
a little messy around the Bakelite phone
but good enough
for it was just a screen door cottage
up north in Michigan
where he and Sarah drove to Friday nights after work.

II.
I felt at first a muttering clunk
as the idle machinery started up
the tinny, little T-stick mallet
struggling loose
from the dried out pivots of time
as if the mechanism had been sitting captive in a wooden chair,
hands tied behind its back
and secretly fiddling with the knots
of oscillation
until the stutter sprung free between the two small bells
and the telephone invited a guess at a "hello?"
a question you never heard from again
for they are unanswerable
no longer acoustic
their green and red and white wires
snipped off at the outlet in a click of a cutter
a legacy left behind
a plastic cover
the phone company had screwed on to cap off the hole.

III.
I heard a drip off the end
of the metal strainer hanging on the wall
over the cat's water bowl
its mesh still wet from being rinsed
perhaps old Sarah put up some soup that afternoon
or maybe it is just Pete's tinnitus acting up again.

Azalea Aguilar

Straw Houses

I was 8 when she left my father for the last time

One morning I decided to ask about the straws
I’d seen them around before
On top of bookshelves, tucked deep into drawers
Straws cut into smaller pieces

She stumbled through the apartment half awake
Starting her clean of the night before
Counters covered in empty beer bottles, ashtrays overflowing
A couple passed out on our living room floor

What are these?
Oh those, my friends kid had a school project
Look, she picks one up puckers the end, pushes into another
You see, you can make a house out of em, in’t that cool

There’s some white powder caked on her nose
A dusting of it on our dining table
It feels real bad in my belly
I wonder if maybe I should hate her

I watch her face for signs of someone I know
Her swollen eyes, hands shaky
Fingertips still fashioning pieces together with such difficulty

D. A. Gray

A Vet Celebrates His 50th In the Waiting Room

Cancer gives way to anger gives way to terror
in the passage through the waiting room.
But it is the anger that does the work, carrying
greying bodies from one stage to the next
and that last stage always alone.
A group of men in various stages shifts, trying
to get comfortable in fake leather seats.
The outrage machine flashes images from the wall
above a stack of outdated magazines.
Some give a stare, a look that says
the world is ending – a reality some thought
we thought we’d have made peace with by now.
Then the image of an uncle, sitting in a room like
this, who said, “I thought it would be someone else.”
The knowledge the world doesn’t work that way
comes too late. There’s an older man leering
at me with a look that says I deserve to be here.
I just leer back, over the top edge of an old
National Geographic, twenty years old,
with pictures of the Sahara – I’m mourning
a time when we thought simply knowing
more people would make us want to save them
or at least think they were worth leaving
to their own destinies.

The towers were still
standing when these pictures were taken.
And we thought we were more exceptional
than we are. I could breathe deep then without
coughing – I half close my eyes, search and pray
for the clean planet I hope is still in me somewhere.
The men are talking about something on the news.
I’m ignoring the words but I know – having made
it half a century, having been for half that time
a proud example of ‘the problem with kids today.’

I flip the page. There are pictures of domestic dogs
who’ve gone wild – the rules of their society have broken
down and they’re standing over a calf they’ve taken
down.
Reminds me of one I found in the barbed wire
on the property line, fur matted with blood, the poor
thing thrashing. I tried to free its leg, only to have it
bite me. I walked two yards to the left and cut the wire
and watched it drag the metal into the brush.

We sit here, wanting to believe in our own exceptional lives,
some cutting fences, some snarling to the bitter end.

Dom Blanco

These Lines

When I see the skyline, I think I line these lines
I think these lines line in the outline of the skyline: jagged, uneven, smooth
verticals these lines, like streets, go on & on these lines go on
a grid goes to dead ends, along one-ways, I think I lay these lines to their end
like beauty these lines I lie in amber, lines I think I lie like beauty
I think beauty is a lie. 
        Lines like lightning over the skyline—
hotheaded lie lines strike these lines, oh, these lines lie
when I see the skyline, I think I lie, I think I line these lines lie
beauty these lines, oh, when I see the skyline lie in beauty.