Trees sawed to stumps
sprouting
Beyond the field another field
and another another
Smelling cut hay
I feel again
(desideratum)the whole
distant
green
kingdom
gone
Scarecrow, be glad I have no knife
all of this world has made me wrathful
(On the other side of the wall
she masturbatesYou unplug the refrigerator
to listen more closely)
Maybe someday cut hay will be
only cut hay
MARTA PELRINE-BACON
Girls Underground
REBECCA PEREA-KANE
The Kunstkamera, St. Petersburg
In the gummy chemicals of 18th century preservation: the double liquid gaze of a two-headed lamb.
Two dogs in the hills above the
Volga circle the farmer in a heavy coat, hooded,
because the lambs come before full sunlight.
The farmer finds the balanceless creature toddling to the ewe,
who nudges it as it begins to nurse, long tail wagging.
He doesn’t tell anyone, not his wife. He nests them
in the woodshed. Two trembling noses nuzzling for warmth.
Sucking each other’s ears, four eyes closing. Their mother stands by
bleating soft murmurs, chewing knots of hay the farmer leaves for her.
But the boy who helps with the lambing must have seen.
Because when they die on the fourth day as it begins to rain
and the farmer lays them down again, still just warm,
on the pile of brush cleared to burn
a man comes in uniform with a decree from Peter I
and a wagon clattering crates.
The envoy stands stiff against the mist, cranks the small body
into a box with a scrape of unhinged featherlight bones.
As the ewe stands by on the slope with whiteless eyes and no sound
the farmboy bends to a snow crocus so winter-famished for light
he can see it unfurling. Its anthered chalice fills and fills with rain,
and the flower swallows, and fills again.
AIMEE POKWATKA
Ashes
My dear, I must have been dreaming. I scattered ashes on the path. He tells me his house lies deep in the forest. I follow him, tell him my story, hoping it’s enough to keep me safe. He picks locks, fills his birdcage with trinkets and jewels. The house pulses with my fear. I follow him. I tell him my story, about ashes on the path, about the birdcage and the finger with the tiny ring. My dear, I must have been dreaming. I tell him the finger was mine. He tells me his house lies deep in the forest. He picks locks and steals jewels. He fills his birdcage, and I follow him, hoping it’s enough to keep me safe. He tells me I must have been dreaming. He tells me to scatter my fear on the path. He fills his fingers with mine. I follow him to his house deep in the forest. My story is not enough to keep me safe. I’m a jewel in a birdcage. I’m a trinket. I’m ashes scattered on the path. He pulses. He keeps the tiny ring on my finger. My dear, I must have been dreaming.
RACHEL RICHARDSON
The Bear’s Wife
Always we Hatfields have lived here. My daddy’s daddy’s daddy Ephraim and his son Ephraim and then there’s my own daddy, Devil Anse, and all of them and all of us to come will forever live here. We now are thirteen altogether, brothers Johnse and Joseph and Cap and Tennis, Elliott, Elias, Troy, Willis, and Robert E. Lee, and my sisters Mary, Betty, and Rosie, all before me, Nancy, called Nan. All that unpleasantness with them over the river is dead now, alongside half them all, hell have them. We took more of them than they of us but we’re not so many as we once was. Bad teeth. Green sores. Cousin Deacon had his leg off after a night lost in the snow—he say he got turned around but we all kenned he was lit to something. Hatfields don’t get lost.
Even me, gone as I can get, never don’t know where I’m at. Littlest, I hide easy. Littlest, I learned to sneak. I was relations ten times over before I could crawl, somebody’s niece or sister or second-cousin, so when I could walk didn’t no one miss me, especially.
I walk far. I walk all into the woods and up over cliffs and through the trees and I keep nothing on my feet all the while. I hears everything that happens in our woods. The deers whisper. Raccoons mumble and squirrels natter endless but it’s all noise I don’t much turn towards. Better them than the squalling of toothy babies and Devil Anse holding up his snakes as he calls to the angels. I can’t hear the snakes—I hear just the woolly ones, fox and hares, bats.
I am shy on ten and a half on this day when I hears what is no secret but what is not what I want heard anyhow. My blood has begun and won’t be hid. I ken what it means even without Rosie and Betty and Mary telling but they tell me anyhow, all three of them fat again with babies in their guts. They pushes me to Mamy Levicy and says look, Mamy Levicy, look at little sister, she is little woman at last.
Mamy Levicy plaits my yellow hair and tells me how it will be as if I don’t know, as if cousins and uncles and brothers hadn’t all been up in me to their knuckles a hundred dozen times already. But nothing ever took and now, say Mamy Levicy, my inside is ready to house the babies I was born and built to make. Mamy praises all and thanks our Lord and I wait to sneak but it’s not long as the spirit takes her wholly and I flee. I am out and Mary gets hollering and Rosie and Betty join in and soons the guns go off and the whole clan comes looking but I know the woods best and I know where to go.
I run past the creeks and over logs toppled soft with moss. I splash puddles and snap branches and all while hearing behind me my brothers clamoring but I will not be got. I don’t ken towards no Lord but I pray in the woods anyhow that they are all three there, Big and Bigger and Biggest, names I given them when they said they didn’t want no Hatfield names, being they weren’t no men.
That’s how they call me Scrapefoot. They gives me the name when they seen my feet as tore up as they were the first time I find them all years back now. You don’t feel that? asked Bigger. None much, I say. They tried a heap of other callings on me, Furgone and Ochrehead, but I answered to none but Scrapefoot. I never felt like no true Nancy anyhow.
They is all three there, Big and Bigger and Biggest, asleeping. I wake Big with hitting his shaggy shoulder and he swipes his claws at me but I kick him back, tell him it’s me. Bigger wakes first.
Scrapefoot, says Bigger. Where’s your wind?
I runned as quick I could. I need help. I’m like to be took and made a mother.
What is mother? ask Big.
I can’t tell you now but you have to help me. Mother means I won’t never come back, I says to them. Mother is forever.
Big and Bigger stand. You are our Scrapefoot, they says. What must we do?
Keep me here, I says.
We cannot, say Biggest. This is not for us. This is not of us. Go, Scrapefoot.
I get hot in my face and stomp, pick up rocks and throw them at Biggest but he is as large as a mountain and more distant than the sun.
You cannot stay, say Biggest. Winter comes and you are not of us. We do not have yellow hair. We do not adorn ourselves.
I take Big’s longest claw and saw through my plaits and give them to Biggest who holds them like gold snakes gone dead. I step from my patched gray dress and let myself be so before them. I am one of you, I says. Help me, I says. Help me and you will never hunger again.
Biggest stands twice as tall as Big and Bigger with more above. We do not want for food, say Biggest. He moves to me and puts his heavy paw on my shorn head with enough muscle to push me straight into the earth forevermore. Ask us what we want.
You want for me, I says.
We want for a wife, say Biggest. We want for you.
You’re collecting firewood. You are less a woman than a collection of aches and sores but the wood must be fetche
d to keep the children warm. Betty and Mary are tending to them while your mother Levicy prays day and night for your sister Nancy’s return and your father furls his snakes about and cries unto heaven. The days go quicker now. Above the sky is flat and white, the forest’s leaves all but fallen. Wherever Nancy is, she is not coming back. You know this but keep the notion to yourself.
She bares her teeth at you.
“Nancy,” you say. “You must come back—”
“I am no Nancy,” she says. “I am Scrapefoot, queen of the bears.”
“Nancy, please—”
“I have taken a husband. He is king among the bears, and within me I carry his child, a bear son who will unleash such hell upon earth as none you could ever know.”
“Nan!”
She winds her arm as if to pitch the terrible knife. You see beneath her filthy cloak that she is as she says, round with child. “It cannot be,” you say.
Your sister steps towards you. She is no longer your sister but some halfling, a feral empress, her eyes rimmed red and bright with madness. “It is,” she says. She moves closer, close enough for you to see the scrim of hair on her heavy stomach, her rank fur covered in a swarm of vicious flies.
“Now go,” she says to you, showing her sharpened teeth, her hot bloodied breath foul in your face. “Go and prepare.”
Note to Reader: The physical integrity of this work may not register on any e-reader. For the most accurate depiction, please see the print edition.
BROC ROSSELL
from Alameda
Butchers on the jury dispel
the narrative
tonic
increateCeremony of the glands
bound his own hands
with a thoroughly modern organization.
Ruins wept in
superstitiously
the Dirt on my feet a part of Me
but no more than
1. The present situation
2. What to do about it?
3. How to do it?
Some frigatefrigate birdwoke
outward, thenupward, long
split-tail lost on the
boyit was all right
turning
for him the Lambrusco-dizzy
bloodand air. But
the world is not like that
nor will it be
Frederick
the Great’s smart Prussian
uniform, an indication
of some belief
in justice. And there it is
Hölderlin in a bathtub
uncorked
the physiognomy of Europe
pressed against the glass.
The result
is a maddening
emphasis in the original on jouissance,
parliamentary mechanisms inadequate
and the musket-ball’s revision
a counterfeit bill
lost in the numbers
of plain speech,
zeroes and ones adrift
in the collective
sensorium
an alcoholic’sof gray economies
practical
value, what Cavell calls
an “acknowledgment
maps onto
an amazing ability to pass on, like
love
consonants of weeping,
vowels of exhaust-
ive detail,
cold rage
at the density of ordnance
ordained by vision and a meat cleaver,
“a soft dismission from the sky.”
A deep and hollow sound
dropped
from the old car of success,
the atomic bombdrunk since 1959
and the talking cure a pair
of paper scissors—
as if you still lived
with a bang
Between those people, a good many of them
identified in the text
as a command to love the world
a glass to dress herself with dew
Whereas Moses
busy knotting ropes
to count the snakes
leaps
over
the woman,
the image of the engine,
all the bony children,
absolute desire
What justice
there is to be found
in an alley after dinner
and there it is
A quiet one late aerosol summer in the north
Poppies on brick
A number of people lying one
on another bring the dead
into the place.
Something very similar
happens in the second myth
when the Mermecolion
of El Cerrito perished
for lack of prey:
“Earth, here you have the whole shipwrecked man
Though, in place of the rest of his flesh,
You have those that ate it.
This tabula votivethis wild-wood Ring Pop
makes one
linger,
shower regularly
in July, wholeeconomies of scale
in a Burger King
bathroom.
The land was secured,
the people endured,
I found a whole jar of amanita muscaria
and neglectedcivil men.
These very
artifacts of acceleration
closing up like like thisdefensible
planet
going red to blue in the face a yawn
fails to obscure.
Sadness grows on a stem
in the hour
small eggs deintegrate
snakesin the wind.
Seas
blush.Alcohol
chides solar
ambivalence
from the chrysalis
of its host,
cardinals
interpellate vapors and gas,
a moment of reflection
in the absence of a word.
Criminal
how the body
goes against its own grain,
thinks big,
singshymns.
has left me
hopelessly afflicted
by
a distinct lack of concern,
a sudden caution
like rain, legs over
accidental lambs.
Harder berries don’t beg
or enter pleas
unknowing predates defense.
The figure is vertical
and the epitaph head-high
like color, like justice
Who “In the end held me in
her grip
but now
with digital cameras
in Bohemia,
she catalogs
a celebration
of interpenetration:
The bosoms and heads of women,
The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys,
not even when the printer
followed by three short blows
no longer exists
do those heaps
extract evidence.
This is an open question—
one evening in late July,
not too rough
There’s a simpler way of doing things,
as when
repetition congeals
i
nto a Commonwealth,
Apoclamation
for the everyday
beggar.
Beethoven, imagining himself a father,
gathered here
in reunion
a corsage as vestibule,
and distribution
legendary.
But when this shall be done let no man
be found indolent enough to decline
a little more trouble
for a good price
of the government’s views.
One mustn’t show ill will
to
a death certificate.
The sea as indifferent to life
as it is to thought
is the same sea more alone in this
than we are
Rumpelstiltskin
plagiarized the shuttlecock’s endowment
and went bowling with it.
“Who Spread its Canopy?
Or Curtains Spun?
Who in this Bowling Alley bowld the Sun?
Sappho conjures Aphrodite but O how great it is that no one
knows my name,
a Publick Religion
of Indifference
pauses a moment to light up
in a field of dipladenia,