Albedo Effect
by Jeremy Audet
restoring Super 8 film of my father putting up
powerlines in Nunavut fifty years ago feels like unearth;
his wisped body slips in half-time into the bulbed
horizon change, as if spinepressed to the kids
who tried to walk home using those meridians of progress,
there in the marginal flux, waiting for an eager eye,
a glacial wring, a remembrance marker toppled in the melt,
like black specks braided to a blackening snow
Jeremy Audet’s writing has been awarded the Bridge Prize and shortlisted for The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize. He is the Non-Fiction Editor at yolk.
The Language of Dirt
by Michelle Porter
she said, listen, the dry season speaks
in the voice of a thunderstorm.
she said, what we forget about cracked
riverbeds is the length of their memory,
their affair with the story of water.
she said, the language of dirt holds
the old words we’ve needed to translate
the arroyo, to read how to
survive the time between rains.
she said, the storm is closing in,
tight as a fist.
been coming on for years:
always knew the wind was going to tear
this grasping from our hands.
she said, waiting is helpless work.
it’s almost a relief, almost,
to stand exposed to the torrent. shivering.
she said, come wind, take the roof off
this house, she said come flood
take the rest, rise over all we have
she said, the packed dust of us remembers
the slip and the muck of moving on.
Depth Sounding
by Ella Jeffery
For many months I would lie
on tables in my lunch breaks,
covered in cotton or still
in my own trousers, my loafers
like taxidermized blackbirds
on the floor, while doctors
scanned my torso. Does it hurt
here, here, here, can you feel
it when you turn or sit or run?
I felt what I imagined as karst
or outcrop, something radiant
with its own internal logic
like a rose window or rolling
hitch, like a horseshoe crab
or snake orchid, complex and remote,
far from language. I no longer slept
on my side, thinking it might slide
or pull, dissolve or double.
This I omitted from my accounts.
It did not hurt or change.
Each week I corrected
my misspelled name on forms,
recalculated my age for accuracy’s
sake. In the surgeon’s lightbox
I saw what emerged: an ancient fish,
pale in the ultrasound’s black sea—
prehistoric, harmless,
and utterly alone. In pre-op
a nurse stropped her felt pen
on my bare thigh, marking
my right side as if my body
was their only guide.
What they took then I couldn’t say.
I woke and felt the same, but never
saw the scans again, dark and still
as water no light can reach.
Who knows what depths
the body remembers, what it keeps
or discards while we sleep.
Diagnosis
by Megan Merchant
This body is codependent with tenderness.
I will wear only soft grey fabrics—
a cliffhanger to mourning.
The morning unscrolls an agenda of rain
and blur ahead. A reminder that there is a before,
but only in the after.
From here, I can see my neighbour rise for coffee
in the slit of light between trees. Animal body.
Vellum. Almost a dance. We are alive,
which means we are both awaiting results.
Tell me, do the ravens hold their breath as they
dive and arrow? My love grasps my hand
for the slightest second. A chipped dish of a moment,
too soon scraped clean.
Megan Merchant (she/her) is the owner of www.shiversong.com and holds an M.F.A. degree from UNLV. She is a visual artist and, most recently, the author of A Slow Indwelling (Harbor Publications) and Hortensia, in winter (Winner of the New American Poetry Prize). She is the Editor of Pirene’s Fountain.
Remembering Kapoho
by Angel Fujimoto-Meagh
Reclaimed by Madame Pele, Hawaii, 2018
South of Hilo, through dark
lush tree tunnels along the red asphalt road
lay quiet Kapoho, land of tidal pools,
where a few bucks would buy a box of mangos,
papayas and bananas, on our way to Kimuras’ place
in my keiki days before the lava.
Along the water’s edge, in a cove protected by lava,
sat two rustic cottages, one green, one blue, screened doors darkened
by trees on either side of the place,
simple one-room cottages, coconut trees, ocean and road,
the smell of sea salt, plumeria, and mangos
in the air, and in the centre, the quiet pools.
Fed by ocean tides, the pools,
one for swimming, one a fishpond made of lava
rock walls where blue and polka-dotted fish, some the colour of mangos
swam, we swam all day until shrivelled, our skin dark
from the sun, eating musubi and teriyaki beef on a stick, no road
noise, just our splashing, squeals and laughter, our happy place.
Once we saw a naked man and woman in this place.
Unworldly, we gaped at them from the pool’s
edge, as if they were Adam and Eve long lost from the road
out of Eden, their old skin wrinkled as pahoehoe lava.
We thought them apparitions emerging from the dark
hedges, though they were only neighbours bringing mangos.
Late in the afternoon under the bright mango
sun we’d float on inner tubes as Dad placed
his net across the channel, where sometimes under us the dark
shadow of a large manta would glide. Later by pools
of light cast by kerosene lamps hissing like hot lava
we fished for mempachi, those wide-eyed squirrelfish in the mangroves by the road,
the darkness cloaking the water, rock wall, and road
as one. Those days are locked in memory like the taste of mangos
on the tongue, gone as the lava
came and covered this place
completely, the red road to nowhere now, the tidal pools
enveloped, the ashes of our collective remembrance covered in dark
basalt. Still, our childhood memories swirl and quicken, red ripe as mangos, under deep pools
not of water, but black lava, that dark fertile place
where new roads may begin.
Whaling
by James Lucas
Below the hull (we hope) are whales,
below the planks, the roll motion
sick who didn’t take their pills,
on deck, those who watch east to dusk
or squint west across blushered cheek
-bone swell into a late sun nailed
like a doubloon in easy reach.
We sail the cusp where light meets dark
within a Caravaggio
of shadow sea, of sea sun-lamped.
A cry goes up: flukes far ahead.
Our engine kicks and labours long
as the held breath in which a whale sounds
but nothing until aft, a spout;
the four points of the spotter’s clock
with bow at twelve, starboard at three
(child’s play within the harbour mouth)
wheel us through time zones and dates
as on our right two forms as one
slow blink of glass surface and wheel.
Whalechasers, satiated, cheer
for innocence—not the whales’, ours—
something we had thought lost or maimed
has crowned though the caul and clot
lights on an ocean wide enough
to clean birth’s bloody aftermath
and had I not six minutes’ dive
to think too hard about sincere
noise as atonement insufficient
to the sanctioned crimes in which
I know I play a role for which
I’ll never be arraigned, I’d feel
as the lighthouse dissolves
into a measured pulse and we
admit we’re spotting blind as we
re-enter the dark anchorage
past hidden Chowder Bay, I’d feel
for one night everything is changed.
Writing Exercise
by Dominique Bernier-Cormier
I asked my students to write about the future
and they wrote about standing
under a chandelier of moss. They didn’t write
chandelier, exactly, but I knew
what they meant. Jewels, hanging by a thread.
The shine and threat. I asked them
to go further. Cars just shadows of rust,
they wrote. Light streaming in
like in a video game temple. Further.
Ink turned to dark Dorito dust
and in their eyes I could see
the misspelled words of dictées
returning as bats. Even further. The faces
on the wings of moths
bigger than faces. I asked them to forget
themselves. The attendance list
burning at dusk. Every list. Further.
Further still. I asked them to describe
the silence. Not a soul, I said.
Until nothing of us is left. No human,
nothing of you, even. Just quiet. And still,
still, they wrote
It was so quiet I could hear
my own heart beat in my chest.
Dominique Bernier-Cormier is a Québécois/Acadian poet whose work explores notions of hybridity, translation, and belonging. His poems have won Arc’s Poem of the Year, The Fiddlehead’s Ralph Gustafson Prize, and The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award. His latest book, Entre Rive and Shore, was a finalist for the BC & Yukon Book Prizes’ Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize.
You Tell Me I Don’t Look Autistic
by Johanna Magin
You don’t look half as hungry as you really are.
You open wide the mouth of certainty, and I
wonder where to drop my pennies. I wake each
morning a stranger to the world, make myself
ready for its assault. The smells and sounds and
reflective sheen have me curled over;
and the screens — the millions — that screaming
chortle of blue.
When my eyes meet yours, you think
we belong to the same country, whereas
I’ve spent lifetimes learning your language,
that admixture of order and what is behind
the order, meant to be known but never stated
clearly. And mine: fulsome and riotous,
you wouldn’t come near.
You say I am long to arrive at my point.
The mind is a funny creature, is it not?
Alabaster made swift in a single gunshot.
Rhizome that shifts and sings in the soil,
many tendrils at a time.
I have travelled in a straight line once or
twice. You say the tests will do their job,
sort us into bins and make good on the
promise. But the fools always knew
it would destroy us, that the world would
go under before we discover another
geometry.
I show you my symbols and you point
to a gaping hole in the sky, meant
to trick us into thinking that meaning
has a mouth, the clouds gathered round
a blue that isn’t really blue, a face we’ve
worshipped without even knowing it.
Johanna Magin is an American-born researcher and writer based in Paris, France, whose poems appear in The Georgia Review, The Bennington Review, Wildness, Poetry Wales, and Nimrod. She was named the winner of the 2024 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize by Cole Swensen, as well as the winner of the 2024 Francine Ringold Awards in poetry.
Can’t Be Far
by Jed Myers
upon the death of Navalny
So you’ve strangered yourself, years slaving bricks up the same huge monument hump,
and swallowed, as if you’ve had to, the soap-opera myths those around you nod to, all
to a vague ache in your chest. So a faintly-rotten-egg scent follows you,
and there’s a needling the skin, out from in. So, like a migraine or flu, it begins—
a blinking, as you bank your wheelbarrow rounding a bend on the ramp back down
for a pour of wet mortar—in the air itself, a tremor of coming-to, shiver
in one eyelid, tiny demon crew camped on a tonsil and staking an itch
your tongue can’t undo. So it starts fresh, the penitentiary uprising
sending its gray bouquet up from the swamp at your daydream’s edge, the unison
chant out of that tower-shade downtown park, the car-honks of sympathy blowing
through the crowd’s bloom of placards. So there’s a chance. You could punch out now
and rub your brow for the rest of the day, watching that pack of stray dogs meditate
under the bridge. You could hitch a ride east—see if you’ll still let yourself
look at that skinny lot that had been an apartment. Or go stand among those
who’ve been leaving red and white flowers against a wall out of love for the dead
one of us who stood for all. Days or years, you could be crossing your own
wind-disappeared tracks, new deities heroes or stars bending your course
by mere tugs on those sparkling strings hooked through your nose—but how far
can it be, if you keep gently slapping your face awake, leave that batch of bricks
in the scaffolds’ shadow, allow the foreman his small shock at your desertion, and walk
toward where that oddly insistent song seems to drift from—is it the 45
disc Hernando’s Hideaway you’d play on the toy turntable on the living-room rug,
or is it out of the beaks of gulls feasting at those great heaps by the docks, or it’s
wafting across the coast range with all that orange exhaust of the flames, that remote
thud-and-roar, the call, like surf-slap, like a gust-bothered screen door, too much
like a muffled chorus, hundreds on hundreds of hunkered souls…. It can’t be that much
of a haul, from this monstrous anthill where you have just stood unbent, swept
the drip of sweat from your chin, and half-pondered the trip you might simply start on
now, through whatever, the bogs, the thicket, the railyards, the battered town
squares framed with shatter-taped dark storefront panes. Can’t be far
can it, from behind your eyes down a carotid slough and on into the aortic
current, upstream yes, to that old thumping waterwheel pumphouse tucked in its narrow
canyon between walls of breath—that’s where you’ve stowed your courage. So
while it’s in you, why not. You can sing all the sorry you want to the constant welcoming
swells’ harmonics (what one of us must’ve heard in the silence of his Artic cell) once
you’re in, but go. You know—it’s unlocked.
Jed Myers’s third book of poetry, Learning to Hold (Wandering Aengus, 2024), won the Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Rattle, The Poetry Review, RHINO, Poetry Northwest, Southern Indiana Review, River Heron Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Seattle and is Editor of Bracken.
Photo by Rosanne Olson.
An Elegy for the Pompeii Woman the Internet Wants to Fuck
by Darah Schillinger
I don’t have a TikTok but the videos still filter through
my socials like hot lint from the dryer, clinging
to my clean clothes, and it was through these lint traps
that I learned of you, Pompeii woman—
how at twenty-three you were buried
under rubble and ash only to become
a thing consumed, a body for the Internet to fuck.
Your body, if that is what we are to call a corpse on display,
lies on its stomach on my screen, stone arms covering
your face in a final human effort to protect yourself,
but it’s your body—the curve of your ass and the spread
of your legs—that made you go viral, not your fear.
I thought maybe it’s a joke maybe
in someone else’s life it’s funny
until a Twitter thread threw me down
a six-foot hole and told me why morgues prefer to hire women
(men like to fuck the bodies)
and how even in death we are made victims,
carcasses picked apart and stitched back together,
fleshlights made casket ready.
I knew then it was not a joke, it was not funny,
how they laughed at you, how they saw you lying face down
in a glass case and their first thought was how they could
take you and make you theirs
two thousand years after god took you first.
Because even before the Internet found your body
and made it food, someone chiselled you from the earth
and placed you on a glass platter, set you
on the table like a pig straight from the spit, and invited
the world to tuck in. Even in death we are packaged
grocery store samples, toothpicked for easy eating.
The knowledge of this clings to me like lint.
[TRAILER] Mission [masculine]: Impossible
by Tim Loveday
it’s who’s eating [Gil’s] grapes [of wrath]
sta[c]y seated [at the head of the tableau]
[cuck]holding her hair back over so[ciety’s]
-&-SOS toy[let]boy
it’s youtu[be] have the right to [free]dom
[don’t] M[M]S[L]N your way into junior or twins
or kindergarten cop[out with[out] your cock out]
[stop] whining to your wine [aunt] about wo[is]man
it’s [just] break [that] down to simp[ler times]
the 6th day Ad[ventist] demanding a total recall[ibration]
it’s time to innovate Ameri/can history XXX[X][State of the Union]
dis[card] the discord[ant] and [ethan] hawk your face off
just red bull your way into a red[pill]
October mo[u]rning [glory]
the [roman] empire strikes back
as a new [no] hope[less romantic]
it’s accost [a]walt [whitman] [anti-winter kid] in a supermarket[able jerry’s pizza]
it’s never take blue [steel] balls as an exit[music to a film]
it’s just [giga]bite the head off a [chad [michael]] murray basin project
e[strogen]lectric blue [collared] men watching you
it’s don’t swallow that iron[man]
it’s 4[chan have] the right to [free]dom [dom dom!]
the dark night[mare] rising like the [burst misandry] bubble[maker]
a promising young man buys a [basketball] diary
man[ifest]s a [fight] club on a sub[reddit]
runs for govern[at]or at [seven]eleven
assigns a woman as their [running] mate
you talking to me[mes]
multiple players spinning [pa]leo[masculinism]
it’s just[ice] to write a cook book [book book]
no one calls you a chicken [tonight]
[deto]note your fore[arm] fathers
[f]u[ck] the pilgrimage
it’s twit[ter] have the right to [free] dumb[ells]
it’s just lea[r]n to drive [a jet ski]
out here it’s the good[guy] bad[boy] ugly[omega]
the white knight rides a unicorn[i[can’t]copia with this]
[ab]out fe[moid]male form[aldehyde]
try [beta-]block[h]er[chains]
just grow a set[tler colony]
Tim Loveday is a writer and an educator. In 2023, he won the Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Award. In 2022, he won the Dorothy Porter Poetry Award. His work has been widely published. Tim teaches creative writing at RMIT. He is a current PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Unimelb.
Juneteenth Mortgage Montage in Blue
by Marcus Wicker
June 19, 2021
When I wish my herbalist an early Happy Father’s Day
he responds with fist bumps, tucks a twenty in my cupholder
& replies: Thanks! Happy Freedom Day, bud. A field of cash crops
shy of forty irrigated acres. But fuck it—I deposit the rebate.
Last week, I threw a heart on a listing not three seconds after
it posted. & in the seven minutes it took to brush my teeth,
change out of sweatpants & speed to East Memphis
it ghosted me. Vanished, into real estate purgatory. Contract Pending.
I arrived just in time to watch an agent ink the sale
on the hood of her milk white Mercedes. These sellers want blood
from a turnip for rotting floorboards. & a bus station beeping
in the driveway. Reader, this has altered my sense of what’s possible.
Fridays, I’m the cranky Sommelier of Zillowland. Hammered off vintage
or ethical sourcing. Our jovial realtor lifts his brow; gestures at a golf ball-
crack in the ceiling & pronounces it a beauty mark. “Strictly cosmetic.”
I lean in for any mention of provenance—a footnote that never arrives.
At an open house in midtown, I tease my fiancé, Let’s hold out for rehabs
that scream: Welcome, desegregated household! Does this wonky wainscoting
say Loving v. Virginia to you? Eliminating craftsmans, cottages, bungalows.
Anything Colonial, Medieval, Georgian, Victorian, or Gothic. Leaving us
ranches. Prefabs & McMansions. Certain grandma & gingerbread homes.
Type Neoclassical Revival into Redfin. Then imagine a dim bulb
swinging above a toothy huddle of ad men, colluding to erase “plantation”
from the dictionary. This morning, our coiffed blonde loan officer asked me
Do you have access to family money? & you’re thinking: Cue deluge! Rented mule!
Here come the amber fields of pain. But I’ve been trying not to rhapsodize
tragedy. Tonight, I’ll raise a plastic chalice to ownership. & dig my Nikes
into earth, where I’ll dream lush gardens. Of money plants, marigolds & herbs.
Leafy mint to snip & muddle with choice bourbon. On a granite kitchen island
designed for hosting breezy derby parties. Because fuck it—
I hustled slow. Bled turnips from a page for it. Now I’m trying to close
the deal on a thirty-year bond for my children’s speculative freedom.
I write the realtor, “What else can you sell me? Is there anything left for us to see?”
He texts back a ghost emoji. A small crop of tumble weeds.
An empty lot, on a cracked street, named after the mortgage broker’s family.
On Sleeping Under the Stars in an Untethered Canoe
by Karen Massey
Long nights carrying, muscled against mauve-black sky;
years
wobble tightropes wired between pine scent & woodsmoke.
Do you remember how to recline on glacier-scarred rock,
to focus starward,
touch the plush grapefruit moon?
Dreamer, you thumbed rides to every mythic & animal
constellation,
butted heads with galaxies, tasted the taunt: expansiveness.
Even clouds release their static, reshape sooty histories.
All of this living has led to cascading refinements of the
now.
You want to lie open under starlight, a whisper afloat on its risk;
to wake rested, nestled inside the ribs of something vast.
Hold On
by Lillian Nećakov
with lines from Tom Waits
Dear Tom,
I want to talk to you about Frank’s wild years, that little Chihuahua called Carlos and why everyone’s always yammering on about the moon.
I stood and watched the end of summer yesterday, a consequence of geography. The seagulls calling hang on St. Christopher, hang on. After, we drove west, chasing the sun and I could hear your voice from somewhere down the road, rusty tin-can-metal grinding, hang on St. Christopher through the smoke and the oil, buckle down the rumble seat, let the radiator boil. And I thought maybe the best days are already done with me. I can sometimes see the gurney in the rear-view and I’ve got nothing left to say.
But Tom, I really want to know about that Halloween orange, and if Frank ever made it past the Hollywood freeway. How those wild years metastasized into a broken chimney letting in the unbearable silence of evening sky. Did you know that Frank was incapable of living in the present, the now is too far, too soon? Did you, Tom, when you wrote Frank into being, did you know he’d be right here inside me like some disease? Did you? But oh the music of it! Gyroscopic, operachi romantico, though there is nothing romantic about a gallon of gas and I don’t think Frank was ever innocent, even when he dreamt.
Tom, you built me a house with no roof so I could look up and see the great wolf coming. So I could see the light and the darkness as a consequence of these restless years.
Tom, the answer is always yes.
Yesterday the sun was on my back like a lung pressing breath into me, a consequence of time. And I thought, everyone is happy but just for a moment, just for that one instant between the time you light the match and the time you throw it.
I stood and watched the end of summer. When we got to our car there was a small raccoon under the back wheel. We wrapped ourselves in towels and lay next to him. The pavement was a country on fire. We sang hold on, hold on, you gotta hold on. And you know what, Tom, it was now, and the sun let go, and I remembered that it was exactly 111 days until Christmas and that I had to hold on and that the answer is always yes. And that tomorrow is a farce and that every birth and every death is the birth of sorrow. And we lay next to him and summer was ending and I could feel the roughness of your hands wrapped around an idea I had.
Tom, I think a roofless house is like a story without an ending. Everyone is dying to get out and the answer is always yes.
I don’t want to talk about Frank anymore. It’s today but in my heart it’s yesterday and I can feel summer stretching to reach me, but that’s no way to live. I once put a needle in my arm and that too was a place, wild and unreachable. And there was St. Christopher, holding up the moon as if it were a gun. And Tom, I hope, I really hope that I don’t fall in love with you.
Love
by Christie Maurer
Sunita, Sunita, Sunita is her name; I am in
love with her. I am naked waiting beneath this
paper gown for her to appear. Long black
hair, cinnamon skin, lab coat, stethoscope
cold against my chest, heartbeat in her ear.
My stirrup-ed feet. Her voice syrups my
aches. Take a deep breath and hold still.
Opened—sensation that cleaves to my throat.
I am in love with her. She looks into me
through the plastic, beak-nosed dilator at my
cervix, swabbing with a long Q-tip, wet with
acid. Hold still. The ceiling, my held breath.
Pliers on the metal tray. The paper tent of my
thighs, she enters, light illumines patterned
print. 3’clock, 8’clock, 11 she calls. She snips.
Samples. I’m not allowed to look. Breathe.
Heavy-lidded, eyes like a mother I almost
remember, she takes my hand when I start to
faint. I want to stay. This room, the lights,
pointed tools. Maybe I can be fixed. Maybe
there is a God who loves me. Sunita, take me
home and sing to me. I’ve waited through decades
for a woman like you.
Goodbye, Beloved Mother
by Allan Lake
No Juliet, no Romeo can breathe easy
in a world without the essential other.
Rio Kyoto Paris Glasgow
Makeshift monster lurks with competing
tentacles. Pointless to nibble delights,
drink the wine to prolong being when
hot air is everywhere but we meet and
greet and eat while fiddlers fiddle.
Someone else picks up the bill.
Rio Kyoto Paris Glasgow
Surely apple was not ever this rotten.
We dined and danced at Rio like bossa
was still nova, which turned out
to be untrue for hosts of corals.
Giant Jesus wept, kept an eye on salsa
party where partners and positions
were traded, were compromised.
Rio Kyoto Paris Glasgow
At Kyoto after a banquet we wandered
tipsy into a Buddhist temple, stifled
giggles in a Shinto shrine while serial
killers made a killing and cannibals
feasted on roast kid with extra
carbon on the side.
Rio Kyoto Paris Glasgow
Photos in front of Eiffel Tower. Hamlet
copped a feel of delegate Ophelia before
going down to a swollen river where
waves sang a version of Baby, Come Back.
Fire or flood, there is time to frolic,
to fornicate the well-intentioned.
Rio Kyoto Paris Glasgow
To go or not to go to Glasgow?
That was a question that should never
have been asked, much less answered
in an indifferent negative. We suffocate
what we lust after in a market-cornering
embrace and collectively finish up,
not at the famed Cathedral to come
clean but in hungover resignation
at indifferent Necropolis next door.
Dubai, Mother Nature, Dubai.
Communio Sanctorum
by Matthew Platakos
Saint George lost his spear and the dragon’s pinned him down
Saint Stephen lost a bet with a soggy Monday crowd
Saint Paul was going ninety before he crashed his motorbike
Saint Hildegard lost her visions to a spiritual general strike
Saint Mark got square eyes from the freaks on television
Saint Barnabas got lost on a reconnaissance mission
Saint Gregory burned the books his doctors called obscene
Saint James ponders ceaselessly the pope he could’ve been
Saint Anthony missed the bus from the burning citadel
Saint Sebastian copped an arrow from a wannabe William Tell
Saint Augustine lost a fight to an endangered hippopotamus
Saint Thomas was getting worried that He’d left and forgotten us
Saint Jane lost her faith in a round of truth or dare
Saint Clare took inventory of the depths of our despair
Saint Simon grew old and had no one left to impress
Saint Teresa confused war for a losing game of chess
Saint Ambrose had nightmares of the extinction of bees
Saint Andrew was cancelled for being a crook and a sleaze
Saint Charles retired to play Pink Floyd to his cabbages
Saint Vincent saw years of higher-than-normal averages
Saint Hubert shot an angel on a hunting expedition
Saint Gabriel intercepted broken enemy transmissions
Saint Joseph was on the plane the Day the Music Died
Saint Nicholas faced the jury and spread slanderous lies
Saint Cecilia was swept up in a wave of Beatlemania
Saint Matthew got lost circumnavigating Australia
Saint Edward named Jesus the king of the dance
Saint Vitus waltzed himself into a war with France
Saint Lucy showed us it was cool to be a martyr
Saint Thomas spilled coffee on the ink of Magna Carta
Saint Elmo grabbed gasoline to put out the flames
Saint Jude made it big to universal disdain
Saint Benedict was proclaimed highest lord of misrule
Saint Scholastica was tired of playing the fool
Saint Valentine was sprung in the midst of an affair
and Saint Peter’s final wish was to be dissolved into air.