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So many winters, dear reader, forging through the snow,
ice-rimed and chiming with cold. So many nights, keeled
in ether, steeped in sleet. Shattered, shackled, craggy,
and daft, I fought, and fought again, with bows and arrows,...more
Maps are useless.
One can only get there
riding the trail of a dry,
fractious wind.
On the secret sea.
The one cartographers so feared
they placed it beyond
the lip of the world...more.
1. To Be or Not to Be
Sometimes you laugh so hard
you think your face will fall
right off. So what if it does?
It won’t hurt, it won’t make
you any different. You’re quiet,
the night is resting, and To Be
or Not to Be flickers on the
television like the cheap slogan
it is. The Nazis invade Poland
and everyone laughs. Nazis
close the theaters and drag off
a Jew, so everyone laughs:
they were only pretending
(as were the pretend Nazis who
dressed up just for the sake
of a daring rescue). Headline:
the theater saves us again....more
My Older Brother, June Bug +
Name I Will Never Forget- by Jason Lee Brown
Roots with the hogs in the field’s shallow burrows
and picks through the thick lawns and meadows
with the shrews and crows for those fat white grubs
with the brown heads that feed on the roots of weeds,
and he collects the bait until he finds a fishing pole
to borrow, though he rarely catches anything but a buzz...
Dreaming of Rome +
While Reading Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on Human Dignity - by John Ruff
You were in my dream, David,
and we were in Rome—
your first visit to the Babylon
of your German Lutheran forebears,
and as if they had cursed you
for leaving Iowa and the farm
to write your books,
your critiques of visual piety,
your monographs on miracles
ascribed to weeping Madonnas,
David, you’d gone blind...
What They Don’t Tell You About Breast-Feeding +
What I’m Not Telling You - by Liz Scheid
One night, as if responding to some invisible signal, all the cows began groaning in unison. They groaned and groaned all the next day and did not stop at nightfall. This went on for days and days. No one could sleep. The children were growing more and more afraid. Nearly driven mad, everyone in town gathered in the meeting hall...
Cretaceous Moth Trapped in Amber
(Lament in Two Voices)
+
Palinode for Being Thirty-four - by Katrina Vandenberg
What a shame I have nothing to give you but midnight, my story
Little moth caught forever in the last moment of before,
of five French soldiers with identically shaved heads,
when the dusk was thick with incense and crickets
the one who spit in my hair, the one who slapped me,
and great northern evergreens wept puddles of resin
the one who kissed my mouth as the others watched.
on the forest floor. What were you stammering toward...
Die Fledermaus +
Sisyphus in Paradise - by G. C. Waldrep
"In my country things had not gone on that long yet. The postal workers, for instance, were still at their posts; mail arrived regularly at the châteaux in & around the village where I was living. There were birds—in the aviary, and beyond it, in the open air. Some days the distinction seemed painful, other days elegant. At night, weather permitting, servants scrubbed the carefully-set panes until the interruption represented by their unyielding presence seemed hardly worth noting.
"I kept a notebook during those years, full of pensive jottings about the scenery, my hosts, my fellow guests—even the colleagues I had left behind in the capital. It seemed to me important that everything be set down, if not in the sort of script or format a court of law would honor, then at least in accord with the sensual reality of the place. Which is to say, in spite of my relative comfort I was aware of the passage of TIME, as I was of the aviary glass. I even fancied myself a sort of clockmaker, with my pastes & pens...
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