Vol. 7 No. 1

Summer 2024

Red Astral Uterus
Editor's Note
Albanian Folk Dance
In the Barn
Death Cleaning
How Everything And Nothing Changes
The Civilian Conservation Corps
Sunrise and Mountains
GPS
One Spoon or Two
Pando
Matching Blue
The Body of God
Annual Visit
Joshua Tree Yellow Flowers
Neighbors
Artichoke
Centaur
Epiphyte Lessons
Joshua Tree October 14 2023
Invisible Work
Loblolly Pine in August
Enthralled to the Dead
Nothing Compares
The world goes on
Why We Let the Striped Bass Go
Sunset in Joshua Tree, 2024
The Walker
shame and the way it hangs from the body like wet linen
Life Cycle
Unsafe at Any Speed
Today a River
This Man on the Street
Alder and Salmon
Induced by the Ice Moon,
Don't Look
At South Lido Park, When My Husband Has COVID
Ice Cave
Nonverbal Communication
The Making of Horses
Series: Asemic Metamorphoses of Space, (vers. 14)
What Noah's Wife Did
The Pregnancy Pillow
Sunrise, September Five
Even Though My Ulna Popped out of the Skin When I Fell off the 6th-grade Monkey Bar…
Loosdrecht schaatsen
Wood Ear
Foraging for Wine
Wisława Szymborska and the Wounded Angel
Bracken
The Forgotten Tree
If you could be any animal?
When My Mom’s Ghost Comes To Visit Me
Parent's Day
Blues
A Decade of Seasons I
Hairpin
As Highway and Bridge
The Drive Back Home from School with Mom
A Decade of Seasons III
Two Defenseless Haibun
Germination
Elevated Convection
Marigolds
Turbulence, A Zuihitsu
Harmony of Humanity: Evolving Empathy
Missing Persons Report #3
What's It Like To Be a Guinea Pig?
Desert Penumbra
Tangled Yarn: Abstract Elegance in Tufted Artistry, Where Fashion Meets Canvas IV
Keep Child Away From Window
Red Signs
By Water
The light at the end of the tunnel
Starting from Scratch
Bird Singing in the Moonlight
The mnemonic FINISH neatly summarizes the symptoms of antidepressant discontinuation syndrome
Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence
Bad Omens
This is My Impression of a Very Good Girl
Ordinary Nights
Dialogue with the innocent dragon

Missing Persons Report #3

“To the centre of the city in the night, waiting for you”
– Joy Division, “Shadowplay”

The last time I saw you alive, last March, I closed my eyes while hail and wind scattered and slid outside on a metal roof,
I could feel the storm making the ridgeline plot of a rotating neutron star, in black and white, like the one on an old t-shirt
“To help with circulation in the cold”, you said,
You removed my coat, peeling me away into the unlit corners of the room, unbuttoning me with pickpocket-subtle hands,
Pressed ear and breath and beard and mouth, to the snare drum taut skin of my back
And said my heart beating was like a hummingbird’s wings, a thousand times a minute

One seeks unconscious respite where one can find it, often in hindsight
And often with the previous attempt, still spinning down to stillness

Like how last month I accidentally fell asleep, for a moment, while I was getting my hair cut at the salon
The stylist poked my shoulder and I apologized quietly, told her I’d been sick but not with what
What could I possibly say
To explain

These unrelated turnings over,
One a pre-death ritual and one a fever
Take your pick, I ask you though
As your spell-like canticles circle me into the new year, halos of birds too fast to see
Gentle in the moment, greens shot from black earth, clippings swept away down the drain
Things I would have told you, that would have been amusing in their triteness and their unearned honesty
Now paraphrased in asphalt and freezing ozone, bitter bitter

Would you hum the empty world again
Bring it to life, a truce, it’s a murder of crows, a parliament of owls, an armistice of blackbirds
Like radio waves, the shadowgraph machine, documenting on burnt paper, the imagined moment, the assumed, like breathing smoke, escape velocity, trailed after and gone into a sky, as black as your, remembered, eyes

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