Eli MacLaren Eli MacLaren

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

https://meganmerchant.wixsite.com/poet 

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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[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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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