Elegy
Ekphrasis on “Last Movement 1996” painted by Samuel Bak No Kaddish rises from this washed-out beige and olive-painted square. The Holocaust is cobbled from the shabby coats, cloaks, scalloped heaps of cloth, and vacant pages strewn about the feet of these three listless players with their instruments, squatting on a heap of cast-off lumber. Bled out, they cling tightly to their faulty instruments, crude bows of unseasoned wood, a cello with an open empty belly. One man wears a gas mask linked by lengthy tubing to the ground—why does he breathe the dirt so soon? Off-center in the...
Read MoreThe Axis
JOURNAL: RALPH L. MOUL, ELECTRICIAN MATE 2ND CLASS, U.S.S. LEXINGTON March 26, 1944: “Crossed the equator again yesterday. That makes it about 15 times I have been across it.” Lost in the middle, the electrician’s mate oscillates as the day’s voltage defines his wartime parameters. The Axis had bigger goals than dad’s axis swerving between latitudes, circulating between longitudes of ocean, final resting places variously deep, but every one unmarked. ...
Read MoreFeatured: Week of May 20 (Dreams)
We spend half our lives in the dreamworld, and this week’s contributors visit that rich land: “(already seen)” by Laura Pendell, a haunting poem about dream visits from dead loved ones “Hell Machine” by Mark Joseph Kiewlak, a poem about a disturbing recurring dream “Fish Feeding Dream” by Michael Estabrook, a poem where pet care takes on a nightly urgency “Frogman” by Jon Pearson, a story that uses dreamlike imagery to get inside a childhood...
Read MoreFrogman
When I was little and little was in my bones, something I could feel and know, something simple and miraculous as stars or fresh dirt, I would stand in the shallows of the San Lorenzo Creek in Santa Cruz and watch the water glide by. It smelled eerie and loud as if long-ago Indians were at the bottom making a ruckus, and the water smelled like shouting. I just knew Indians had something to do with water, the dark cool of it and the smell of it. I wanted as a kid to breathe the water, except I knew I would drown if I did. I sort of wanted to drown, too, though. It might be worth it just to...
Read MoreFish Feeding Dream
In this damn recurring dream I have a fish tank an elaborate fish tank (I don’t really, in real life have any fish tanks, when I was a child I did, with guppies and goldfish, black mollies and catfish, but that was another time, another era) a big tank, 50, 80 gallons, maybe bigger, with plants and colored rocks, ceramic bubblers and some large beautiful fish, serene fish, floating along in the water, angelfish and zebras, neon tetras and sucker-mouths stuck to the sides. But in this dream I keep forgetting to feed them, I don’t remember feeding them for weeks, yet miraculously they are...
Read MoreHell Machine
Yellow ribbons unspool, disappearing with the curvature of the Earth. I eat yellow ribbons. The road is gobbled up before me. I drive these roads only at night. It is always night. Hubcaps dance, spiral-spinning. Tires scribble rubber-black meaningless symbols, translatable only from heaven’s perspective. Cliffsides hold back empty air, lest it rush in vaporous waterfalls to my mad lungs, drowning me dry. A lone shrub marks a passage through shiny gray guardrail taffy-twisted. Drunk at the top; sober by the bottom. Time is a window in a very high office building through which we...
Read More