Issue 2.9
October 2024
Seth Strickland
"My Father Didn’t See"
"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.
Grace Atlas
Two Tourists as Romulus and Remus
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.
Donald Goodbrand Saunders
Ariadne on Naxos
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.
James Croal Jackson
Under the Sink
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.
Devon Brock
Circular, Like a Breeze
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.