Issue 2.9

"My Father Didn’t See" My father didn't see the possum trundling to whatever possum night-business it would go to. Its spine, its flesh, skeleton, especially the skull moved the car, which was large, even by American standards. The half-pleasant errand conversation there stopped. I looked back, hoping to see anything but movement, hoping the candle of life had been snuffed so utterly that there wasn’t smoke.

Two Tourists as Romulus and Remus Tepid and infantless, a stork perches atop the ruins of the temple of Artemis. The steppes behind us nurture a lone poppy, fire-red. Fresco fragments litter the halls; some are gods, others battleplans. We are enraptured. Like an oracle, a scene beckons: two men stoic atop a ruined city. The temple fractures. The stork flees. Fire drips from the divine bust, We would burn Rome for her. I would burn Rome again.

Ariadne on Naxos “Just a business trip,” he said. “I’ll be back before you know I’m gone.” Ariadne no longer bothers to look out to sea. In the shade of a beach bar her back is to the Aegean, her horizons now bottles of raki, retsina, ouzo. She’s a tolerated fixture. Tourists from the mainland love to hear her stories, those twisted, amazing tales of palace intrigue, scandal, affairs and betrayals and some weird monster stuff (crazy, but she spins a great yarn) and the words pour out as long as her glass is topped up. But from time to time she falls silent. @tab @tab @tab @tabTwo images are contending for memory: Ariadne on the shore waving off her lover till the black sails vanish. Ariadne at a dark portal reeling in a cord gone suddenly slack. Seeing the frayed end, she allows a thin smile. The corners of her labyrinth were so hard and so sharp.

Under the Sink In your dream you murdered me. I am just happy you dreamt of me. Carried chopped pieces of me in your tote bag, hid me under your sink among the grocery bags and water stains. In the second half of your dream, you said I got out from under the sink and said *I got you!* And I always will, pieces of you I carry with me, your proverbial heart in mine, your eyes locked in mine, your subconscious wrestling our not-so-tiny distance, where when I moved I thought you’d never think of me, that what you’d carry was the end, the sloppy end with the broken bones, the cut-up conversations, the disjointed hugs in summer heat, the space we loved to share, daylight hours a cool shade of blue, a shield in which we wished for our shadows to never escape or at least hold the other’s fading light. I never want to be surprised when our paths cross next in life, how I miss the days you’d inhabit all my dreams, days, the whole field and the entirety beyond.

Circular, like a Breeze I will not give my heartbreak to a river or a browning flower or a cloud dissembling in the stratosphere. It will remain right here, not like a tumor, not like a dim city risen from the plains—steel on steel, story on story: firm by a lake— but in the shade of someone barely seen, slipping in then out of this, gracious if not cunning, wounded and lithe, having no more form than a tremor or a half- remembered laugh, no more form than an unheld hand or a warm breeze.