Issue 1.10

The Red Heart’s Tilt *For Rimbaud* Through bristles and fern fronds, flailing ground the red heart, wheeling, slant in sun and plaited grass, makes its mad dash for the violet-patch, for distant honeydew. And didn’t you, red heart, ride the blanched waves, rebuff the wind, send the soot hooting from your vents, couch your lance, tense your veins? *Reins,* red heart, *reins*—too quickly and you’ll reach the fence, visor battered, gleaming pauldrons rent— what trumpets would herald you then?  What decibel wrung from the temples? What silk garment thrown over your oxen shoulder; what crocus pinned to your luminous breast? Red heart, the chase is never finished, nothing pitied there in your quest across the gumplants, the violent sprouting land. The blood will fill your boots like wineskins. A river stirs far beneath the ground; A prong, an angry word is on your tongue— speak it now before the daylight’s gone. *Others will begin where I’ve succumbed!*

They Shared a Trench *New York Times, 2/20/23* Within the empty Kropyvnytskyi flat, a mantel decorated with Christmas lights lifts the newlyweds’ photograph nestled amid saints’ icons. There the dead soldiers repose, her head bobbing on the chest of his tunic, her large eyes tracing a distant cloud or turbine as her painted nails meet. Smirking, as if startled from his fall to earth, he combs his hand through a sea of daisies.

I Am Not God, but I Am Sorry Clamp a misgiving to your chest. Let it dismantle your focus as I take the pen and double-tap the signature line. Attune to dissonance—cresting amplitudes as thoughts riot like weaponized tuning forks: stropped and honed until able to sever angels’ wings, hiding their faces from heaven. Words slither through us like polonium from teabags, principles as bullets fed through the chamber. Remember that integrity is a property of objects and nations permit conscience to twinkle about the edge of a bayonet, splitting moments into forgone conclusions. Walk away. I cannot make whole haphazard shards when every joining shatters elsewhere; rearranging our fissures until we are ghosts hoping what flickered within finds us worthy of stillness.

Favored Son Sow your ash and dust in the scorched husks of the wheat stalks, broken teeth collapsing into salt as though God spilled countries across the fields and declined to name them. You dance on idle hands, planting rifles for headstones—bullets cutting wounds into the earth as a mosaic of casings and sinew. Kiss its jaggedness on the forehead as your favored son then carve into it an absence of self with knives knapped from the bones of the once-men reaching out of the topsoil.