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Born-Again Mystic by Benjamin Goldberg

October 1, 2012 Contributed By: Benjamin Goldberg

You’re pulled out of your eyes
through a shredder of venetian blinds.
Your breath, cold and disrobed,
wanders from your throat out to the red
barn where embers it remembers fell
back in their birch-tinder beds.

Are you waiting for dawn songs
and drums? Morning to slink
across the yard in her fragrance
of stale beer and burnt sage?
You’ll remember your last life
by the clay-stained skirt she draped

over your shoulders as you shivered
just a bottle’s toss from cinders.
Watch eyelids chop to an ah-ha
any light meant for revelation.
Listen as the television suffices
for a pin drop in this silence.

Return to table of contents for Issue 6 Fall 2012

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: October 1, 2012

Further Reading

Contributor Bios for Issue 4 Summer 2011

Issue 4 Summer 2011 ADETOKUNBO ABIOLA is a Nigerian journalist and writer. He has published Labulabu Mask, a novel (Macmillan Nigeria). He has also published in print and online magazines such as Rake Journal, BBC Focus on Africa Magazine, Flask Review, Zapata!, Liberation Lit, Sage of Consciousness Review, Africa Writer.Com, Big Pulp, the One World Global Anthology, The November 3rd Club, Mobius-Journal for Social Change, Dog Eat Crow […]

For Tameness by Kate Partridge

Like you, I cannot resist the impulse to watch animals eat. I invite a bearded goat to munch from my palm. I have never appreciated facial hair. Rather, the imprecision of elephants cupping fluids in their trunks. The arrangement of the pellet dispenser on a fence. Gumball machines inside a buffet. On a road trip […]

Canyonlands National Park by Jeffrey Taylor

A suicidal pheasant offered himself to me as sunrise peeled the thin skin off a dreaming canyon. The tree-line and hills cracked knuckles. This silly bird snapped his own neck against a hackberry stump. So strange. I gathered him up— quietly mourning. On the hood of my truck, desert heat loosened soft meat from bird-ribs […]

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