“Messenger”
Luke Johnson
I would not name
Him,
could not cut
the throbbing
umbilical,
nor listen to him
suckle,
small calf, then coo
a reckoning:
contusions
like islands
or stars.
_
He made
a mess
of my lover’s
body. Fault lines
formed,
where his jaw
pinched tight,
fracking
for tinctures
of blood
and colostrum, that
cloudy drip,
consumed
_
In the night, a wail
in the willows,
at the window,
bright eyes
piercing,
peering in,
a sign of praise.
The boy,
die cast
by starlight
soundless,
a tendril
of witch hazel,
winnow of smoke.
A flame
ground thicker
as the hours
turn.
“John Cage Reconsiders Harmony”
Rikki Santer
His head inside a temple bell tiny temple
bells inside his head/he shapeshifts
into a zen galaxy of shimmering silence, tiptoes
onto a sunlit spider strand swaying
with rhymes of dew drops. Listen. Ghost
moans and mewing from the belly
of deep-sea/primordial fungi in emerald
songs from crystal goblets. Sip
color frequencies, the sweet persimmon
of sacral chakra. As stopwatch
ticks and yarrow stalks mix,
his footprints scribble scrabble over sands of
self and soul. The bark, the bray, the squeak,
the thrum. No walls. No vessels.
No music. All music. All vowels and consonants
seeping from Void.
“Red dot”
Dmitry Blizniuk
Translated from the Russian by Sergey Gerasimov
We ate our youth from the knife.
Night fishing trips, moonlit dates, and you,
a jug-eared hero,
burnt yourself with naked girl's flesh,
like with hot fish soup.
Moon fry raged in the flowing hair;
the haystack crunched and shimmered;
the froggy pearls of cabbages showed blue.
Our hearts were two cherries—sticky, violet,
with a soft rot of growing up,
their sides grown together.
God, give me back the inspiration of youth,
the blue world resting on straw elephants,
that town all in turbulent orchards,
the glassed-in yacht of the kitchen
that smelled of apple vinegar,
mosquito bites, the river, river, river again…
The sunny guillotine of summer
licked itself with golden blades,
and you,
figurines made of brown sugary clay
over the blue abyss—
learned to write simple words
with your soul and body,
like first graders write with a pen:
love, friend, sorry, forever, never again,
fuck you.
While you are young,
the microphone of silence is on.
Entrance is free.
Come and say any nonsense you want,
but you aren’t listening to me…
Youth, I feel your stare:
the orange and red dot
of a laser sight.
“Nothing”
Randall Brown
No, she said, it has to do with money, the way you waste it. I did have lots of money in college. We sold the pot Alex’s friend Fed Exed from Arizona. It had red hairs. I ate sushi a lot, bought Ray Ban sunglasses, entire catalogs: The Replacements, The Smiths, Dylan. I bought a Trans-Am. I drove Sara to the Mountain Club in New Hampshire; we hiked and ate mushrooms that tasted like cow shit, or how we imag-ined cow shit to taste. The leaves burned on the paths. I handed Sara a wadded pock-et of crumpled money. That’s when she called me a rake. I should’ve said something instead, something about the things I surrounded myself with, the world going to seed because of it. Sara— her red hair alit like signals across mountains—left me alone a few feet from the peak. I watched her descend, and I thought about what was behind the money and other things, too: the fall of leaves, the sun and stars, all of it.
“House of Croaks”
Jules Archer
Sideways in the country, there is a noise in our old house with no explanation. It rattles beings and belongings. Adam’s chisels clatter in the basement. The glass eye jumps like a bean on the fireplace mantle. A creak from an otherworldly plane, it comes when we least expect it. Mornings, while making love. Nights, while making eggs. When we hear it, Adam widens his eyes and holds an exaggerated finger to his lips. He tells the house to stop showing off, that no one is allowed to moan louder than us. I giggle and press an ear against the lumpy drywall. I imagine old ghosts within the walls. Only the good kind of ghosts though; the watcher-over kind. Ghosts who tell each other it is their house that is haunted. That we are the not-real ones. Beneath the tangled bed sheets, Adam asks where my crystal ball is. I yoke my arms around his neck. I pull him close. I shush him so we can hear everything we already know.
“Cabin”
Bryn Gribben
I dream I have kidnapped my ex-boyfriend after his wedding. He’s not resisting, but that’s probably because he never wanted to get married—in real life or in this dream. Helping me is his ex-girlfriend of eleven years, only prettier and more fun. He never wanted to marry her, either. We are all in a powder blue kind of church—the kind you’d see in a 1970s movie or like my sister’s best friend’s childhood home, also from the ‘70s: all pale blues and crystal chandeliers. Maybe it’s even like the Goblins’ Ball in Labyrinth, where another woman tries to get back what she’s lost. Helping us out the window is maybe the minister. Upon waking, later, I wonder if he is the imago of commitment. “Hope you can do something, girls,” he says, pushing a suitcase over the sill.
**
In real life, he is still unmarried, although he started dating six months after your relationship of years. They’ve now been dating as long as you two were together. You know this because one friend group still hangs out with him since he works in the lab with the friend you thought of as a brother. He skis with them, takes trips with them, goes every week to happy hour with them, and, because they think it’s immature of you not to want to see him ever again, is invited to most events hosted by them. Events that used to structure your holiday life—Passover, Cinco de Mayo, Fourth of July, Rosh Hashanah—all have become his. He invites to those parties, you hear, his other friends, all of whom were friends of the ex-girlfriend who held on eleven years, who thought involving him in household projects might convince him to stay. He always liked to be useful. She had to stop seeing those friends.
**
The ex-girlfriend squeezes a duffle bag behind the passenger’s seat. We get into a packed car—but nothing is in the trunk. It’s all in the back seat, whatever “it” is, including snacks. So we all sit in the front. I even think he’s driving. Driving his own kidnapping away from his
own wedding. We get about thirty minutes out of town when he suggests pizza. “And I was thinking,” he says, “that instead of buying pizza, we should stop, and I should make you pizza.” I realize he’s thinking of stopping at my Aunt Pat’s, who lived in the next town over, thirty minutes over, in fact, from my childhood home, and where we’d always stopped to visit after we had pizza. Dreams aren’t always that creative, I think, even in the dream. But I am worried thirty minutes away isn’t far enough. The new wife might track us down. I was thinking something further away, vaguely, in the mountains. Vaguely, in a cabin. “Keep driving,” I say, as the ex-girlfriend nods along, changes the tape.
**
You’re having this dream because you just saw him last weekend. You’ve seen him twice in four years. Once, it was in the grocery store: you’d come up the stairs from the underground parking and locked eyes with him, just as you hit the top step. You both froze. He was wearing his brown “Peace” tee shirt. You wondered briefly, even as you thought you would throw up if he noticed you got bangs. “Should we talk or just . . . walk away?” you stammered. He said nothing, opened his mouth, then closed it, opened it again, closed it again. “Walk away,” you said, making, again, the decision. You walked away, angry, sad, undone. Last weekend, he was at the Christmas party. Three years ago, a year after the break-up, he’d also come, but you had cried so much the Last Link Friends agreed not to invite him anymore. They don’t like it, but, after all, you were the minister at their wedding. You do help cook all day for this party, as you have for several years. You do live two blocks from them, and you are both handy, thus, to feed each other’s cats. Of course, also, they say, they love you. But you really need to get over it.
**
In the car, I reach over, and he puts out his hand. He’s really doing well with being kidnapped. We hold hands over the console. It is far from consoling. It’s better. I feel a peace settling over me, almost biblical, or death-like. I haven’t been this happy in years. The horizon is still pink in the distance, and we both sing along to Other Lives, the last band we ever saw together. How the ex-girlfriend found them on tape, we’ll never know. What a beautiful show that was, a stage set with stands of individual, flickering Edison lightbulbs, the orchestral sweep of such a small band, trumpets, piano, even an ocarina. How like being in love it all was: the flickers of brilliance, the soft and gentle light, the waves of lush sound like the feeling of being pulled under by love, by a water that will never drown you.
**
Three years later, he is here, at the Christmas party. Without telling you during the day, as you made one hundred cream puffs, stuffed them with deviled ham, with Roquefort cheese cut with cream cheese, the Last Link Friends must have decided enough was enough. He is, after all, a co-worker, and how awkward it is to leave out a coworker. You see him from the kitchen and sit down in the corner, on the steel-lidded trashcan. You try to drink a martini, try, as you have for years now, to imagine what to do with these feelings: anger, loss, sorrow.
**
We pull up to the cabin and get out in the snow. So peaceful, he says and carries my baggage, compliantly, up the stairs. I carry his.
**
You have tried to get over it. You have tried hard. You have tried softly. You have tried to give yourself time, you have read books on grief, and you have, at times, tried to embrace that you may be alone forever now. Other friends, not the ones who say move on, remind you that his new girlfriend wants to get married, too, and that he still refuses, that even though he has moved on to another girl, nothing has changed for him. And in some ways, he hasn’t moved at all: he still lives six blocks from you. You try to reframe your own attempts at dating as the five stages of grief: the 24 year-old immediately after (denial), the next real love who smoked and had a child and who wanted to get married and then didn’t (bargaining), the man in the open marriage (anger), the alcoholic (depression/anger, though it was his depression, your anger at it). Anger twice in a row. Anger still for some reason, when if you think about him for too long, you still start to cry.
**
The ex-girlfriend opens a bottle of wine. I am glad to see there’s plenty. This may be a rough night. He walks around the cabin and looks out the A-frame window, at the river. It should be frozen, but instead, we see it roiling, churning up dead tree limbs and wet moss. “It’s beautiful,” he says. I put his baggage in my room, with me.
**
It is, after all, the season of Epiphany. You look at his handsome face, how easily he talks to his group of lab mates by the Christmas tree, by the electronic Nutcracker music box you both bought for the host at Costco, years ago, and you realized you are still in love with him, so very still in love with him. How angry it makes you, that you are not together. How angry it makes you, that no one told you he was coming. And then you realize you are the one who no longer belongs.
**
In the cabin, we make pizza, and it’s really good. But it’s time to get down to business, and as he lifts the second slice up to his mouth, I ask him, “Why did you do this? Why didn’t you want our life?” His mouth is already open, yet still, somehow, he gapes. He gapes like a fish as if he is surprised this is the reason for the kidnapping. He opens his mouth to speak, then closes it. Opens it again, then closes it again. Like a fish gasping for air. This goes on for several minutes, just as it did in waking life. I’d watch him try to break into a conversation, lean forward, open his mouth, lose his moment, sit back into the chair or the bar bench or simply rock back on his heels if standing. I’d watch him open and close, open, close, on the couch, when we’d try to talk about the future. The dream hardens to its edge, and I worry that I might wake up before I hear him speak.
**
For better or for worse, they say in marriage vows, or, in this case, you say to yourself in a different configuration. For better or for worse, he belongs more at this party than you do. You sit in your glittering cocktail dress on this cold trashcan, which seems, as in dreams, too painfully symbolic, so you stand, move through the room, and towards the door, out of this party. How long have you been going to this party without caring that you don’t know anyone? That every year, you wake up the next day sick, hung over, from trying to have fun, knowing this is the only thing to which those friends, who used to feel like family, invite you? Angry, you pause before the door, before him, and tell him he needs to leave. He looks at you, surprised you’re speaking to him. You want to throw your arms around him, feel his sweater underneath your hands, rest your hip into his, as when you used to walk together to this party. “No,” he says. “I’m not leaving.”
**
Open, close. Open, close. In waking life, once, in couples therapy, the therapist took pity on him once and redirected his speaking back to me. “He’s not saying no, Bryn, but he’s not saying yes. So why do you keep hearing maybe?”This part of the dream doesn’t feel even remotely like a dream. I even hurt, in the way you’re not supposed to in a dream. In a dream, things are supposed to be said that can never be said out loud, and you’re supposed to receive it all neutrally, finally, the perfect observer. The one who can accept what’s always been, silently, said all along. The ex-girlfriend, who hasn’t said much this trip, except that she’d like mushrooms on the pizza, now leans forward. She looks at me sympathetically, even though this all was her idea, too. “He’s not going to say anything, Bryn.” It’s the first time she’s ever used my name. It wakes me up. I look around, think again of his face, and wish I was anywhere but six blocks from him, this grief, in another neighborhood, perhaps, or, vaguely, a cabin. Somewhere I could go where no one would tell me to move on.