October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Daniel said once that the clouds in Kansas look like giant gray brains.
Their thoughts all big and drifty and slow like ruminant sky gods.
Brains that hover over wheat fields and ineffable highways stoned
on the grandeur of their high seat until they die a raindeath or blow away.
Tonight though the sky looks hungry. Not brains but intestines.
A stomach twisting and digesting whole football fields of nimbostratus and dark Latin.
Birds scatter from wires leaving utility polls behind to hum and spark in the lesser acids.
We hear via radio of a possible tornado along I-25.
A black esophageal funnel that may or may not swallow.
The dogs come out with me onto the deck and bark death threats at the sky.
Low rumbles of famished drought-stricken thunder.
Water sits bubbling on the stovetop, forgotten, next to a package of dry spaghetti.
Only the wine makes it outside. A blood-red South American scud cloud
in a heavy glass tumbler. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight, they say.
And though I am no sailor, the wine pulls me further and further into the clouds.
by Michael Young
Michael Young lives in Fort Collins, CO. He studies microbiology by day and edits Rust + Moth by night. He has been published in Aries: A Journal of Creative Expression.
October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
Absinthe Dream
You share with me a bottle of special absinthe
I drink a sip
(Of that special substance!)
I feel the world slip.
The bottle clatters on the floor,
The glass window behind me shatters a thousand score,
And all of my reality is reduced to shredded tatters,
As I see the ashes fall,
As I hear the howling wind call
From a black void that swallows us both-
-in a pitch-black stasis
Where we can stare
At each other’s faces-
I hear you breathe,
I hear your heart beat,
As we embrace,
As we kiss,
As we touch,
As we feel our warm bodies together
In this cold realm where time has stopped,
Where deadlines, obligations, stress, rivalry, anxiety, and uncertainty,
Are nowhere to be found.
But if this moment ends,
I will wake up,
From dreaming,
Broken and screaming,
Falling and crying
And burning and dying
In a cacophony of fire
Raging out of the broken rubble in a twisted spire
That will consume you and me
In a black, lifeless, and torrent-ridden sea.
A Viking Eulogy
I will not let her name be forgotten
In a field of whimpers and whispers,
Nor will I let her memory dissipate
Into nothingness as I grow bitter and senile,
And I will not let her be confined
To a rotting obituary page
That flatly states that she died in a mess of metal and gravel.
I will give her a Viking Eulogy,
The story will say she had healing hands
To soothe a troubled soul,
And her soft voice would lift hearts,
And put a poor creature’s fear to rest,
And her hugs were tight and filled with love,
To anyone who held her dear in regard.
She was a Priestess of Peace.
I will give her a Viking Eulogy,
I was a lost man
Until she found me
Sitting on a stone bench.
I told her I was a broken piece
And she fixed me up for a day,
She told me to forget about the person
Who broke me, and I did.
She will have her Viking Eulogy,
I will not let her be forgotten by the ravages of time
Because her grave stone will break down from disuse
A thousand years from now.
I will sing of her Viking Eulogy.
by Kristopher Miller
Kristopher Miller has been published in Sifting Sands, Tenth Street Miscellany, Down in the Dirt, and others. He is also the self-published author of The Maze’s Amulet, an urban fantasy novella and the poetry anthology Poisoned Romance; both these books are available digitally on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
October 2014 | back-issues, poetry
I am frantically searching
for a sharp knife: I need
to cut the sulfur from my skin.
From this river side, I can tell you
the signs of infestation:
1) the growth of tubers, and then
2) the spread.
3) When every bank of the river is covered
in tubers, the river will die.
We invented herbicide to combat this.
Sulfur, like cancer or tubers, is small,
spreads quickly, and is nearly impossible
to be rid of once it catches your skin.
Have you ever used herbicide only once?
The tubers will return. What’s unnerving
about cancer is being given blinders
and told to gallop. Try to ignore death
when it appears on the edge of the roads.
I have sulfur hiding under my skin, or
sulfur growing like tubers. It’s seeding,
turned my bloodstream yellow, and
I know this will be the end of these rivers.
by Noah Dversdall
Noah Dversdall is a young writer from Dayton, Ohio. He works as a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal.
