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Morgan Matchuny

An Ex-Addict’s Thoughts on Phallocentric Language

here is what I do know. you can’t break a habit like a man, bend it over leg & snap it, hammer it. can’t bury it under cement, brick it down in oceans reckless & degenerate. can’t cut it open, pull out the junkyard meat, leaving holiness & innocence to be used again & again. & for what? you have to feel it, be it. treat it like a woman. how do I know? because I am. I just am. there’s a trick to everything, a loophole. threaded subtlety born for subversion. & we have been misled. see, I didn’t brawl with my addiction head over foot, tearing flesh from the sockets. didn’t fight my depression like a campbellian hero on some mythic journey to slay a beast & return home, regaled & changed. there were no laurels at my reunion. only ghostly pallor & frightened eyes, words redacted & edited hundreds of times. you think you have to shatter yourself. a million little performance pieces renting space in the minds of men. what about your mind? I give myself permission to leave their battlefield, their stomping grounds. pull the thread. some infinite tapestry unfurls before you. the only way out is through the language not built for me and you.

Meg Pokrass

Dreaming of Comforts

There’s always a brother somewhere who will offer a stranger a bowl of soup. There’s nothing as good following a meal as a stolen cigar. The earth is red, the horses are wild, the men are smiling as if life is beginning all over again. They didn’t die in the desert. Blistering minimal, the fair-haired man no longer resembles a shedding snake. They are sharing maps and they are dreaming of comforts. Thinking of a woman’s dog-brown eyes, an apron falling from her shoulders, a sweet-faced hound by the fireplace. They are talking about what happens when they get there wherever there is. It feels so good to be with a friend who used to be an enemy. Talking about money, dreaming of pillows. Watching the horses run with their heads together as if they’re telling each other secrets.

Giles Goodland

Feeling

Feeling for ripeness of fruit the finger unexpectedly breaks through at a rotten spot. Touch them hard enough, they touch, in return: how plastic, feelering, I could stroke the felt of the infant’s head for the attrition, the finery. At the tomb of the unknown particular, or in the balcony scene, gross mechanical hands turn the world off or turn it in. Touch runs the fingers along the inexplicably yielding.

Noah Soltau

Running Errands

Fiber optic line knotted like methamphetamine spider silk over February fields, drone nets like white frosting crisscrossing the pastry brown remnants of unharvested crops. I lay under a thermal blanket, wanting baked goods and waiting for my radio to crackle. I’m not mad; I’m just disappointed /beep/ I just wish you would tell me about things before they get to that point /beep/ drone buzz. A truck in the distance, maybe a kilometer away. A crack, a low thud from a secondary fuel explosion. A few pigeons flap across the buttercream sky. Anyway, I know you’re busy /beep/ Let me know what you find /beep/ Blanket folded, I stitch gray footprints in the dusting of frost and soot, trudge hungry toward a column of smoke in the distance. Love you /beep/ Love you, too.

Ken Poyner

Breaking Through

He has been seen on the corner by Thole’s, reading aloud from a stash of loosely organized papers. Just another poet to ignore. Two popped up last week: one as a cliché outside of the coffee shop, one two blocks down from our town hall. The one at town hall the authorities chased away. No one knows what they read. We have so much to ignore. If you want to make a splash, run naked at mid-day along Main Street, or start implausible rumors that nonetheless flex our moral sensibilities. Indulge our crudeness. You will not grow our attention spans.

Iain Grinbergs

What the Cattle Knew

Each July, I flew west out of the tired vinyl of my mother’s house, the flowers always lying, and kept flying. Lubbock was an odd flower. I never knew which way the corn grew. It didn’t matter. The landscape was all scrape and echo. The dust, a strange heaven. The cattle read my dreams. They said, We know, we know. I’m the most unserious person you’ll ever meet. One day, my father made hummus. Another, sausage rolls. He showed me his latest estate sale finds: still lifes, a Smith & Wesson rifle, a clock that stopped. Then we went farther west—through New Mexico and Arizona and Nevada—until we broke somewhere in eastern Utah. I said, I found more little bottles in her boots. He said, That’s how it always goes. No, I don’t pray anymore. Did I even have to tell you? I’m holding the long view. ♦