Matt Mitchell

poem where the poet is on antonio brown’s side through all of this

(with excerpts from Jon Gruden’s phone call with Antonio Brown)

When I open my mouth about you, praise
is masked like carnations & sugarplums. 
 
I make the whole damn spot a garden 
about you. You’re the most misunderstood 
 
fucking human being in my entire life that I’ve ever
met. I turn my television to your games & when 
 
I get there they’re already beautiful. We praise 
you because we love you & you’ve fed us every 
 
Sunday & we talk about you running routes like 
a shadow, coercing ghosts out of your legs for 
 
six points, god of joy & finesse. All I know is you
got a lot of things going on. I won’t lie, all these seasons 
 
later, I miss you, but I get it. Six points isn’t always 
enough. There’s a lot of people that have an opinion 
 
about you. I hope you gather around with your 
teammates in the end-zone again & dance for the 
 
fun of it. I didn’t know a damn thing about 
superstardom until you walked into Cleveland & 
 
put on a whole fucking clinic, grew a whole field of 
landmines in my mouth each time I said a prayer 
 
& you made a one-handed catch like a true god, 
putting the nail in the coffin on my Browns. 
 
I have always hated you, but I love you for your 
delicious no-fucks-given attitude. You turned a 
 
whole sport into a love language. You are gonna piss 
a lot of people off when you start doing what’s best for you. 
 
I, too, have given my body to someone & been 
left abandoned & wanted something better.

---

Matt Mitchell is an intersex writer from Warren, Ohio trying to make his work as beautiful as “Keep On Loving You” by REO Speedwagon, the quintessential pop banger. He has a music column, “Timefighters & Unbelievers: Illustrated Essays on Music & Identity” in Flypaper Lit and is a member of the Northeast Ohio poetry group Sad Kids Superhero Collective. His chapbook, you & me & the pink moon & these portraits, is out with Ghost City Press. He also has poems in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Drunk Monkeys, and BARNHOUSE, among others.

Sarah A. Etlinger

I Worried All Night about the Birds

I worried all night about the birds:
they shivered on icy branches,
and I feared they would slip off
and tumble earthward; hitting
another branch as they fell.

I must have forgotten they could fly--
even in an accident of wind
they could rely on wings;
if they missed a branch
they could always 
fly to the next, right themselves
in the storm or remain in the nest,
or hidden among branches.

It’s funny the things we forget
or forget we remember--
especially when there’s an ice storm
and you’re next to me, asleep,
not gazing at the window 
worrying about the birds.

---

Sarah A. Etlinger is an English professor and Pushcart-nominated poet who resides in Milwaukee with her family. She is the author of two chapbooks, Never One for Promises (Kelsay Books, 2018) and the forthcoming Little Human Things (Clare Songbirds, 2019). Her work can be found at The Amethyst Review, Royal Rose Magazine, Neologism Poetry Journal, and many others. Interests include cooking, traveling, and learning to play the piano.

Sarah Sarai

This Poem and Joan Crawford

This Poet is banging her head against a wall,
Trying to write This Poem.
She knows the wall isn’t trying to write 
This Poem. Don’t be rude. 
Though it observes This Poet’s head
In watchful silence not writing this poem.
This Poet’s head is watchful in its silence.
Don’t think the wall doesn’t notice.
In silence, This Poet stopped writing This Poem. 
Which wishes This Poet picked up a six-
Pack on the way here. Pull tabs.
This Poem thinks of happy times with pull tabs.
That post-pull tab hiss. This Poem is lippy.
What is This Poem but a representation
Of every fiber of This Poet’s being?
This Poet wants to thump a frying pan against her head
As punishment for “every fiber of This Poet’s being.”
This Poem demands Joan Crawford return to Earth.
“You are vile, vile I say, you whom I hate 
With every fiber of my being!”
Yeah, she nailed it. We’re in agreement on that,
This Poet, This Poem, the six-pack scored at the line break.

---

Sarah Sarai’s work includes That Strapless Bra in Heaven (Kelsay, forthcoming); Geographies of Soul and Taffeta (Indolent Books); The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX); and five chapbooks. Her poems are in Ethel, Sinister Wisdom, Boston Review, Posit, Barrow Street, Ascent, and other journals and anthologies. She lives in New York City.

Sarah Senseny

Justice as a Make-Believe Sister

Justice cradles pain like an infant in her arms.

Justice tears her nails in the brown earth, persecuted by fool’s gold.

Justice trips skipping up the steps of a courthouse. 

Justice buries her children under a mound of grey oval pebbles. 

Justice whispers intently like a daughter to a god, like a daughter to her father.

Justice will let you borrow her burden for minute, maybe two.

Justice lays her broken bones in the silent sand.

Justice sings like a noon-time kettle on the boil.

Justice denies her hunger so she will die.

Justice will not surrender to the satin waves.

Justice wants nothing more than to restore her ribs to the dirt.

Justice will not allow someone else to be the sparrow devoured by the hawk.

Justice shoots a flirty kiss and then laughs.

Justice drags her feet like forks on a plate.

Justice wishes she were a child again, when everything was simpler.

---

Sarah Senseny is a poet and artist from Fort Wayne, Indiana. She has been editor and publisher of the University of Saint Francis’s literary magazine The Sullivan for two years. You can read her review of Blythe Baird’s If My Body Could Speak at http://www.americanmicroreviews.com/if-my-body-could-speak-by-blythe-baird.

émilie kneifel

sam, son

she traced his sleep, shallow breather, shadow mountain, wound through the ribs of his sheetless night. his heavy hair clutching his moon full breasts. her other hand, underpillow, clasped her mother’s good pair of scissors. cold metal like the cat’s gaze, which carved her out from the silence. bracing his scalp, she tugged all his hair into eight spreading braids. snagged an elastic. snapped. she uphaled, ready, but their forked ends were drooping with heat. and she, no, stay. she, oh, fell asl / until his breath gurgled, gug, the undoing ropes flexing and writhing into his — glint — with both of her hands, with all of her weight, she hacked, closer and closer, to his skull, his skin, and where she slammed the two blades into one, each hair brittled then sparked - delilah the first morning, in apricot light - the single hair they pulled out from deep in her throat - that time the moon went unspilled for a week - his left thigh, sweetsticky as rice - her fist, abrim with the scrunchie they lost. and then the strands wilted. and it was dark. he gulped awake, eyes haloing his face, hands haloing his clumsy new head. saw her, seeing him, and crushed into his palms, because the thing about potential energy is it doesn’t unshatter. but she clung to his shoulders, tried to smooth his blunt hair, said, i know, i knew. and she did. she knew from following the veins up his arms, from fitting her ear into his, from wishing her wishes onto his eyelids. so he let her hold on, fingers tight as attention, let her whisper the truths that condensed up his neck: sam, son, samson, samsonsamson,

---

émilie kneifel is everyone (a critic) at Adroit, PRISM, Exclaim!, The Puritan, Bearded, Debbie, and Phluff. their poems-etc whip-or-will in Bad Nudes, Vallum, Canthius, Tiny Essays, and Theta Wave.

Robert James Russell

After a Long Day at Work, He Contemplates a Vasectomy (and the Western Interior Seaway)

God’s honest truth: He wants this museum 
to himself, no hollering kids. Interloper, 
he mouths at a brassy child touching 
a glass case, leaving fat fingerprints. 
In the next room, three dinosaur 
skeletons sit idle as crackling children 
break the rope barrier 
and boom toward them
while their tired teachers
look at watches, tug at humid-thick 
updos, delirious delirious. 
No way 
He could have one. No, he barely has a relationship 
with his brother, whose wife died suddenly,
who wouldn’t let him in 
(though he could’ve done more). 
But what’s the point? Once, Nebraska 
was nothing but ocean, a vast sea 
stretching from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico, 
and they say we’re headed back 
to that doom, that the Melt 
is coming and we’ll have to navigate 
by boat. 
Imagine that, 
all the harbors, 
those ships pouring in. 
How would they find each other?
Imagine 
what they’d even talk about there 
at the end of the world. 
Anyway, he could always swim.

---

Robert James Russell is the author of the novellas Mesilla (Dock Street Press) and Sea of Trees (Winter Goose Publishing), and the chapbook Don't Ask Me to Spell It Out (WhiskeyPaper Press). He is a founding editor of the literary journals Midwestern Gothic (co-founder) and CHEAP POP (founder). You can find him online at robertjamesrussell.com.

Abigail Warren

The Wedding Reception, North Country

My seat was at the table 
with the rednecks from Alabama
I didn’t know;
talking guns, hunting, in their
southern twang.
I was, with my northern, educated
smugness, melting like
a hot knife in warm butter.
 
Brenda Lee sat next to me,
and shared her story
about the adult daughter 
she has at home who’s slowly dying.
You know that same kind of brain tumor
Joe Biden’s son died from?
I have a neighbor checking on her,
I don’t leave home very often.
I didn’t tell her about my own grief;
how, between wedding toasts
and the father of the bride taking that dance,
 
Brenda Lee was more like me,
if I’d had courage.
 
There I was, for a few brief hours,
when all our differences seemed to
slide beneath the tablecloth
of womanhood, 
as she poured out her heart,
with the second glass of wine
her husband said she could have.
Tears made the mascara 
run down her face.
I reached over with a tissue
and wiped that creamy white
southern skin of hers.
 
Grief and motherhood
floated around us
in embryonic fluid.
 
I left Brenda Lee
at the table, 
reached out to 
take her hand,
say goodbye,
this apparition of myself—
someone not to leave behind—
told her how much 
I enjoyed her company.
 
I’m a hugger,
she said,
and threw her arms around me
pulling me in
close enough
to smell the rose perfume on her neck.
And I could take a brief look
over her shoulder
and not turn away 
from what she had opened
in me.

---

Abigail Warren lives in Northampton, Massachusetts and teaches at Cambridge College. Her work has appeared in Hawai’i Review,Tin House Reels, The Delmarva Review, Serving House Journal, among others. Her essays have been published in SALON and The Huffington Post. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her book, Air Breathing Life (Finishing Line Press, 2017) was nominated for the Massachusetts Book Award, and her second collection, Inexact Grace (Regal House Publishers, 2020) was a finalist for the Terry J. Cox Award.

Juliet Cook

Oxymoronic Limbs

Why do you want me to apologize 
for my recurring bad dreams?
It's not like I'm dreaming them on purpose.

In this one, a balloon animal violently expands 
into a disabled water balloon. It twists itself
until it explodes and blood sprays out.
 
In this one, the interrogation chamber is a swimming pool
filled with purple blood. My mouth opens,
then turns into a dilapidated drain,

repeatedly clogged by mounds of torn off hair.
I can't talk, all I can do is retch.
My entire body becomes a gag reflex.
 
In this one, I am a human skeleton head
with a giant cow udder body
spewing blood until it finally dries out and I die.

So far, I've forced myself awake before my death happens. 
I've placed the blood inside my poems.
I don't want to be told to cut it out,
to cut my own limbs off and replace them.

---

Juliet Cook is a grotesque glitter witch medusa hybrid brimming with black, grey, silver, purple, and dark red explosions. She is drawn to poetry, abstract visual art, and other forms of expression. Her poetry has appeared in a peculiar multitude of literary publications. You can find out more at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.

Linda M. Crate

felt like dirt 

when i said
something to sister about her job,
and how the kid probably
didn't like touch
because he was autistic
you had to bring up that i was weird
about being touched;
like i am not already self-conscious enough
about myself—
& maybe it was just something
you were curious about,
but you could ask rather than 
accuse me or put me in the spot in front of others;
it made me feel like dirt when you brought it up—
maybe that's why you apologized
i don't know,
but despite that hiccup dinner was lovely;
and i don't know how to be better about touch
only i don't like things that are forced
and sometimes i would rather be near someone
without having to touch them.

---

Linda M. Crate's poetry, short stories, articles, and reviews have been published in a myriad of magazines both online and in print. She has six published chapbooks A Mermaid Crashing Into Dawn (Fowlpox Press - June 2013), Less Than A Man (The Camel Saloon - January 2014), If Tomorrow Never Comes (Scars Publications, August 2016), My Wings Were Made to Fly (Flutter Press, September 2017), splintered with terror (Scars Publications, January 2018), more than bone music (Clare Songbirds Publishing, March 2019), and one micro-chapbook Heaven Instead (Origami Poems Project, May 2018). She is also the author of the novel Phoenix Tears (Czykmate Books, June 2018).

C. Cimmone

Safari

I take off my Robot

When he comes around.

I pinch pimples in the mirror 

And tell him the medicine 

For my bad days isn’t working anymore.

He doesn’t know what to think of his new girlfriend 

So he took her on a Safari.

He knows I had vodka but I tell him 

I’m sober so we can argue again.

He is my favorite and I do not worry about the long black hairs behind my knees

Or the dimples in my thighs.

He shakes his head when I suggest he read my Junk emails aloud, but he does it anyway.

He sweats through the sheets all night 

And I wash my vagina before he wakes up.

I dig my Robot out of the sheets

And he goes back to Safari.

---

C. Cimmone is a North American author and comic, specializing in blue and observational comedy, short fiction, and narrative nonfiction. Cimmone serves as a contributing author for Arouse Magazine and editor-at-large for Trampset. She also serves as a reader for Marias at Sampaguitas. Her prose is featured in a menagerie of literary journals.

Bailey Grey

trailer trash

and i shout that you're all fake

it was bound to happen someday : i found out it's not normal
to eat marshmallows toasted on saltines : an oddity born
of whatever was left in the cabinets : it's not normal to screw up 
your reddened face against the cold : no coat but 3 thin jackets
layered : hands stuffed in pockets : sleet bleeding through 
the holes in your tread : counting seconds at the bus stop
the neighbor kid insulted my dog : i startled myself when i began
shouting : a feral defensiveness : an oddity born of whatever

---

Bailey Grey is a bipolar software developer living in Virginia with her boyfriend, a puppy, and a grumpy old cat. Her work has been published in Crab Fat Magazine and Dovecote Magazine, and she can be found on twitter (@BaileyGWrites).

Ottavia Paluch

How the Burial of My Soul and of Other Nouns Would Most Likely Take Place

This I know: it’s buried under the house. So
if the house collapsed, the graves and their fragile jewels
would sink even further into the ground.
 
Which is to say that
all the courage hiding beneath grieving flowers
has now landed in hell. 
 
Prometheus will claim it, call it his own.
He will live in my home, shove thorns in the walls
until you can’t find a single one underneath all the rubble.
 
Then he will become the thorn,
pricking the mourners, just as I should have done.
It’s so raw. Like crying.
 
So raw. Everyone’s eyes will peel layer after layer 
of their two glass onions, try to hide them when they blink.
But the ghost writing my eulogy can only conceal so many tears.
 
I tried scaring her, it’ll say.
And yet, she remained unfazed.
As she is with all things, everything.
 
Old man recites a prayer dedicated to my soul,
ones I would have never said while alive. 
And it goes:
 
GOD 
HELP US FIND THE COURAGE WE NEED TO MOVE FORWARD
FOR COURAGE ACTS IN THE FACE OF GRIEF
 
I’ll say amen with the mourners—
they know what it means more than I do.
They don’t stutter when they pray.
 
I am worthless to an extent.
Death comes at a price.
In heaven I’ll ask for a discount.

---

Ottavia Paluch is a disabled high school student who lives in Ontario, Canada. A featured Gigantic Sequins Teen Sequin for 2018, her work is published or forthcoming in The Cerurove, Alexandria Quarterly, Body Without Organs, and SOFT CARTEL, among other places.

Darling Fitch

Midwest

Waist deep in America Overdrawn on gasoline and 
Chinese takeout  
We roll downhill and 
Wait for the floodwaters to carry us back up again 
We’ve remortgaged our lives 
And we’ll be dead before the balance comes due 
These moldy walls 
Don’t need to be rebuilt  
With bleach in every bottle 
This country will never come clean   
 
My unwashed hair a pipeline from this to that 
My eyes a cash register: no sale 
My heart a finished basement 
No sunshine but I spent a lot on it  
 
And all the shirtless boys I’ll never meet 
So serious and discreetly savage 
Broken by technology and spitting up their pearly teeth  
Down shipping corridors and out to an imagined coast 
Set their cruise control for reckless endangerment  
Careening knowingly  
Into the thick of it 
While I just pass on through

---

Darling Fitch is an American-born, Berlin-based writer, musician and performance artist. Their performance work has appeared in festivals internationally, including the Dixon Place HOT! Fest, the Edinburgh Fringe and the Month of Performance Art-Berlin. Fitch holds a merit award in fiction writing from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. Recent poetry publications include Slanted House, Anti-Heroin Chic, Berlin Art Prizeand Transnational Queer Underground (TQU). In April 2018, Fitch finished the three-year durational multimedia project A Stranger Sound, an auto-ethnographic narrative of gender transition and community. They are currently touring Revelations: A Hopeful Harsh Noise Poetry Pop Opera About the End of the World and Our Place in It. 

www.darlingfitch.com
www.patreon.com/darlingfitch

Catrice “Reverie” Woodbury

Ophelia

My neck snaps like a
gunshot,
with a bang.
I am destroyed, I am undone,
my thighs cracked like
an egg in a skillet,
sizzling, forced
apart –
a snap, a crack, a tear
in the fabric of my universe –
yellow police tape stretched
wide, over miles.
How does it feel to be a
walking crime scene,
everyone who knows asks me
with not so much as words,
but with the pity in their eyes.
How does it feel to have been
buried alive,
the earthworms filling
your lungs
as your ribcage collapses under the
weight?
How does it feel to be all used up,
like a soap dispenser, empty,
meant to cleanse, purify,
but rendered useless?
 
Dandelions sprout from my mouth
as I lie lifeless in the river afterwards
like sweet Ophelia,
deposed then disposed:
my body, 
he left it in the creek
out back, behind the woods,
and the dogs searched and searched,
hunting the scent of victimhood
like his predator nose sniffed out
a weakness,
a chink in the armor,
vulnerability.
But I want to wash myself in survivorship
like a fancy perfume I could never afford,
I want to hold the crystal bottle between my hands,
and squeeze.
 
And
where were you?
They told me that first time
I emerged from the waters,
reborn,
that I was a beloved daughter
of the king most high,
but if that’s true,
how could he leave a princess of heaven
there to die?
Where were you
when I choked on strands of my 
own hair, lumped in my throat,
a hand over my mouth,
a whispered hush?

Ssh, baby, I know
you said you don’t know what you want,
but I can feel you want this,
between your legs,
you want this,
you want this,
you want this –
 
Baby, we’re the perfect match for tonight,
see how your neck fits so
nicely between my fists?
See how I can turn you into
your childhood ragdoll?
See how you float on the ceiling,
an out of body experience?
What you call trauma, I’ll call bliss.
Isn’t this fun?
I have a decade on you,
there’s so much I can teach you,
so let me on you,
and as I try to show you
this isn’t so bad,
wrap your unwilling arms around me,
I need this moment of tenderness in the violence.
 
I said don’t look at me 
like that, bitch,
don’t you know all women are bitches, bitch,
don’t you know women are prey to be chased and taken, bitch,
I cornered you on the balcony,
a false Romeo to a girl who never wanted to be Juliet,
and I have you in my teeth,
but this is catch and release,
after all… we’re friends, right?
 
But now I’m kind of nervous
the sound of your pleas might stick
around, haunting my memories.
I said stop crying, bitch,
I said move there, bitch,
if you’re not going to move,
then I’ll make you move.

They told me I was chosen,
and I feel nothing but forsaken
and you can keep your slam score,
because the only number you can put
on a survivor is one in four.
 
Does the heroine exist only to
further some man’s plot?
Only exist to
die for some man’s pain?
To be used and abused and manipulated
into what the man wants?
 
Remember how he offered me a 
cigarette,
a consolation prize for stolen virginity
and bloodstained bedsheets?
Where were you
when I put it in my mouth
and puffed
as if everything was ok?
 
I hear the cry of the witches
his forefathers failed to burn.
I’m ready for battle
as they call to me like sisters:
be bloody, bold and resolute,
laughing to scorn the power of man,
for none of woman born
shall harm
me.

---

Catrice "Reverie" Woodbury is a spoken word artist living in Charlotte, NC. She is 25 years old. She released her debut spoken word album, The Patron Saint of Eating in Bed, in 2018. When she's not writing and performing, she can be found making coffee at a cafe, working with women struggling with substance abuse at a local nonprofit, or participating in Bible study with her friends. Keep up with Reverie on Twitter (@reveriethepoet) or on her website: https://reveriethepoet.wixsite.com/reverie

Kevin Ridgeway

My Drug Dealer Cut Off My Hair

he was my barber
and my drug dealer
he cut up crystal into lines
with the same hands
he used to cut off
my locks
until they were
too short
for my dead mother
to recognize me in
my slenderized body
and a mind 
burning from
the inside
and I was
no longer
her baby.

---

Kevin Ridgeway is the author of Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press).  Recent work has appeared in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, The American Journal of Poetry, Main Street Rag and San Pedro River Review, among many others.  He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.

Lucy Whitehead

Gift-wrapped

I have swallowed a jar of your darkness.
It wriggles around inside me like jellied eels.
 
I'm unpacking a gold box you sent bursting 
with panic attacks that look like Mexican jumping beans.
 
There's a set of clenched knives delicately wrapped
in red silk. A miniature cactus whose hot pink petals unfurl
 
in a fist full of thorns. Raspberry cupcakes frosted
with shards of glittered glass. A wooden maze 
 
of razor minotaurs, where I spend all day hunting 
for your lost candy heart.
 
In the middle of my living room floor, knee deep 
in satin ribbon and crushed tissue paper, 
 
I draw your sharpness from my chest.
Next time, I'll scribble 'return to sender'.

---

Lucy Whitehead writes haiku and poetry. Her haiku have been published widely in various international journals and anthologies, and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Barren Magazine, Black Bough Poetry, Burning House Press, Mookychick Magazine, and Twist in Time Literary Magazine. Her Twitter handle is @blueirispoetry.

Ezra Lebovitz

Critical Standards

---

Ezra Lebovitz is an undergraduate at Harvard University. A New Jersey writer, he is currently an editor with Sooth Swarm Journal and has previously participated in workshops with the University of Iowa and The Adroit Journal. Recent work has appeared in decomP Magazine, L’Ephemere Review and YA Review Network, among others.

Brooke Nicole Plummer

New Wave of Underground

I read through Kierkegaard's enormities—
I curiously roused the transcending ways—
I waged tempered opposition against civilities binding physical form.

And in these steepening epiphanies intersectional, 
I am willfully in occupancy—accompanied by these
cognitive ornaments applauded
in these scenes of people I step out of barriers for, 
like an antioxidant and Abaddon breathed in simultaneously.

A system of bleeding words—
A system of self-sustaining sedations—
A system of absurdities roosed & digging graves for the complaints—
A system of hysteria playing back and profiting artistically
while standing under unfinished basement LED rope lighting—
A system of surgically analyzing the Malaysian verse
and attempting the heart into a fixed rhythm.

It must be drumming through the chest with the sensation of

needles & presence, 
needles & presence, 
needles & presence.

---

Brooke Nicole Plummer is an artist based out of the Midwest region. After a DIY show featuring Indianapolis musicians, she bought a personalized Blaze pizza for her friend, but her friend couldn’t eat it because she lost her retainer in the parking lot while pregaming. Her first chapbook, Flyover, Compiled Nothings, was self-published in November of 2018.

Rick White

last night i dreamed of how you will die

last night i dreamed of how you will die
without ever having held a frightened bird in your hands
felt the tick of his snowy carriage clock heart
you will die misremembering the sound an eighteen year old summer makes
never having heard grief’s pale whisper in the bonfire leaves
you will die eroded, vitiated, incomplete
the missing parts of all your stories playing white noise on repeat
last night i dreamed of how you will die
betrayed
because i could not keep my promises to you
even though i loved you in every single one of my ways
you will die with skin like paper
pages glowing embers in the fireplace
the smoke will rise up the chimney
the ash will fall down from the sky
and somewhere perhaps i will taste it on my tongue
and know that you once wrote me a snowflake
perfect
just for a time

---

Rick White is a writer of fiction and poetry from Manchester, UK whose work has appeared in Storgy, Cabinet of Heed, Ghost City Review, and Back Patio Press among others. Rick lives with his wife Sarah and dog Harry and currently occupies third place within the hierarchy. Rick appreciates your support during this difficult time.  @ricketywhite.

Julian Day

Fable

for Valerie

The last pages begin gradually.
Fragrant and herbal –
lilac and sage, his lingering promise.
 
It starts slowly enough,
like the old tales, 
the ones that struggle
 
under their weft.
We see you finally
unhook your heart
 
and the irregular rhythms ripple
through the forests of the ancient world,
where the creatures know
 
your name and face,
every want
you can’t let go.
 
It’s spring, and his voice is still 
music. Later it will turn 
and darken, become the strange
 
language of beasts. 
In each of the stories
someone is always taken.
 
This time we learn about it 
after the ending, 
and only then 
 
the grisly means
of how you came 
to pass –  
 
not in the story, but out of it; 
in the aftermath, 
its sudden, killing cold.

---

Julian Day lives in Winnipeg, Canada. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The /tƐmz/ Review, CV2, and Rockvale Review.