April 2012 | back-issues, poetry
Scattering Garden
The bushes bear
no seed in winter.
Mourners stand
on planks
of a wooden arch.
They release ashes
onto rocks below,
a sea of blank faces.
Spider’s Stance
An alabaster stone,
smooth as the rock which bore it
and washed it by the stream –
among grainy bits of speckled white,
stood a spider.
It turned – paused – positioned,
its body, thick and copper,
reared like a wild mustang
in the western plains.
I swallowed my fear,
careful not to exhale,
breath held in suspension.
Waited – then it hustled down into a gully
and I skipped that stone across the stream.
Form
Who pushes the wind past cheeks stinging harsh
through a window slit on desks scattering
words lying in print: neither you nor I.
Emerson’s beauty?
Frost’s dark design?
I have stood against the wind, screamed its name
as it raged destruction on rooftops, dismantled birches
to its will and stole a lover’s locket
up into concealed blankets of smoke grey.
I have welcomed the wind, whispered its name
as it swirled droplets of warm salt air,
carefully lifted a child’s kite with ease
up, up into illuminated blue.
Ideology
is a lost stranger to freedom in form
pushing forth the wind.
Dickinson’s soul may rest easily.
by Katie Reed
April 2012 | back-issues, fiction
by Abigail Robertson
She talked of working in the factories, riveting metal to metal, the amount of manicures it took to right the calluses. She said it was like sewing together planes. She asked what the war was like. I wanted to say it was like sewing body to body, trying to hold the world together…I told her people saw worse than me. She frowned. I was not a war hero with medals pinned to my chest. I was a man with neatly parted hair who drank too much, coffee and the other stuff. I could not be riveted back together. This was not a callous that could be buffered away. She toyed with perfect pin curls and commented, with a pink pursed frown, about the rain. I remembered the rain, shiny on the fogged glass of my watch. The hands ticking, obscured by mud. Time was obscured by mud and tin can meals and the cold of the trench. Her nails were a familiar red. She fussed with a stray thread on my shirt, flashes of ruby against the forest green. The forest was darker, greener. Threads didn’t stand out in forests. She smiled rows of perfect white teeth. I remember sand and an ocean and foam that bubbled bodies, shoving them against the shore. A cemetery. She asked if St. Laurent would be warm this time of year.
