Contributed By: Ron Czerwien
Night in infinite decline,
it doesn’t matter. Stooges club each other
for joy, while a scale of ascending
bleats weigh the peripheries. From border crossing
to interrogation cell, a split hair.
I feel the urge to lift this curtain between us
with my teeth. I’m a jokester
and a terror. To think some agitated
dust would rush to revise my footprints.
And then there is you, unaccustomed to this cold
red smoke curling out of my sicknesses.
Return to table of contents for Issue 6 Fall 2012
Alexis M. Smith is the author of Glaciers (Tin House Books, 2012), her debut novel, which I read (and this seems important) in one day following a month-long dip, or submersion (near drowning), into Moby-Dick. Why mention my Melville antics? Say what you will about the whale epic, but that book is dense. Like swimming in Campbell’s Chunky Sirloin Burger […]
decides the fate of every love story, even when a cloth is sodden with wetness. He and she ride to town on a noon bus, she, sitting on his handkerchief. They have been sent for groceries, he, one week new, friend to her father, under him at the Consulate. Packed in with peeling leather bags, […]
Let’s say that you love life so much that you outlive your spouse and friends and enemies, your taste and hearing, but not your income or your brain. “102 and sharp as a pin!” Though your gold retirement watch has stopped, you’re still delighted, when you wake, that you don’t have to go to work, […]
