Issue 1.10
October 2023
Zachary Daniel
The Red Heart’s Tilt
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!*
J. A. Marcus
They Shared a Trench
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.
Ghali Greythorne
I Am Not God, but I Am Sorry
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.
Ghali Greythorne
Favored Son
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.