After Rapture I am found kneeling beneath the last _____blasted tree. Winter on my shoulders and a sparrow’s red skull lodged _____in my mouth. I have cut my hair to feed the fire. Remnants of a city _____dusting my lips. No nations left to die for or hide in. Only this voice— _____woven through the cracks of a halved piano: that sound a doe makes when the arrowhead _____replaces the day with an answer to the ribs’ quiet hollows. I reach _____for the charred branch and push. Blood dots the dust beneath me. My wet face titled _____skyward. I push until he starts to crown, my name already dripping from his lips. He writhes _____through me, scraping for that precious shard of light, where the wolves _____have already gathered— their half-moon fangs brightening the hour. But I push _____anyway. I open. I wound. And you— dear reader, you will call [...]
Roy Perez
THE ICE :“What are you dreaming of?” :“The ice.” :“But you are on the ice.” :“I am thinking of the ice I will be on.” :“We are standing on the ice right now, facing each other. We are on the ice touching lips, we are squinting out at sails that move as if on a track.” :“I only know that we have not fallen through.” :“What are you dreaming of?” :“The ice.” :“But you just dreamt of ice.” :“That was a different ice. This time we are indoors. The light is blue in that underwater way. The sadness is dimmed, and at the end of the day, you are fetching.” “What are we looking for?” :“I can’t remember.” :“What are you dreaming of?” :“The ice.” :“But we are indoors. Blue light, et cetera.” :“No, we are standing at the edge where the ice breaks against the sand, triumphant.” :“Breaks what?” [...]
What Night Knows After Gaugin’s Le Cheval Blanc Some women ride horses. Some women are horses. Some horses are wolves who have lost their teeth and are ridden by women. Some wolves are horses ridden wild with dreams. Some women are dreams in the shape of horses free of the ghost of wolves. Some ghosts are women, their bent air a kind of riding. Some women ride dreams and bend the air, freeing the ghosts and the wolves, and the horses. ___________________________________________________________ Lauren K. Alleyne is a native of Trinidad and Tobago. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Cornell University, and is currently the Poet-in-Residence and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Dubuque. Alleyne is a Cave Canem graduate, whose work has been awarded prizes such as the 2010 Small Axe Literary prize, the 2003 Atlantic Monthly Student Poetry Prize, the Robert [...]
Life’s a Beach Life is waves. Waves create a craving for Dr. Pepper, something sweet to cut salty somersaults that get water in yr inner ear, and deft kelp evasion, and hours and hours coaxing friends further in but they never want to go out as far as you– past the point of wave-beaten, past the point of even being subject to waves, where the huddled ocean cups you and blows like soup. Some diagnoses require a different type of medicine, like shots of expensive silver tequila reminiscent of beach sand or smooth pie crust like a desert island which may just be the proven psychological tide of butter, but what’s the difference? Life is waves. In terms of spectral dynamics, and guitar riffs, and ambulance sirens and your “type” of guy, which is basically any pipe cleaner over 6’2– who all eventually say move on– and especially with tattoo [...]