On a Portland day without rain
Two billy goats boarded a train
While looking for views
They made national news
The reaction has just been insane
Morning confessions churn in her throat like ash, though there is no altar, no listener, only the habit of speaking to herself in half-finished sentences. The words rasp, brittle, and fall apart before they reach the air.
Mirrors no longer flatter, chairs grow harder, nights longer. The house smells of dust and the faint iron of rain.
What remains is a slow ruin in the shape of a life - walls thinning, plaster shedding, memory gnawed hollow. She drifts from room to room, touching framed photographs of relatives she does not remember the names of, waiting for recognition that does not come.
Be holy or be nothing, she heard once, but now it means only: endure or vanish. She holds the words like pebbles in her palm, cold and heavy, useless.
Someone said the word sacrifice, but it tasted like salt. She remembers swallowing it, remembers the way it burned her throat. Now she keeps her mouth full of ash, a ruin in a ruined house, the prayer unfinished but burning anyway.
I remember being small and ambulatory, as I was finding my way in the world. But that was before. Then came a time when I felt ready for change and I discovered a safe place, a warm and soft haven, a refuge where I could rest undisturbed. I slept and changed, grew and metamorphosed into my new, wonderful shape. Now I am almost ready to face the world again. Soon, it will be my time and I’ll venture forth once more, renewed and reborn into warm sunlight. I’ll emerge into the world in triumph, bursting through my human host’s abdomen.
They whisper about it now, but we used to have magic. That state of newness that only water can provide, that was real, honest magic. Magic came from water. We ruined it. Magic doesn’t exist anymore. End of story. It should have been the end. But there are whispers.
Large bodies of water go through a process called turnover, I explain to a lecture hall full of overwhelmed freshmen. It makes the water different temperatures, rising and falling within the lake.
The middle zone is thermocline, I valiantly impart on them, the middle zone is change incarnate.
Fresh snow crunches under my feet as I trudge towards West Lake Okoboji. It’s beautiful in winter, frozen solid with ice fishermen spotting the surface. It’s also, just barely, deep enough to test my hypothesis.
The thing about turnover is that it only goes so deep. Under the thermocline is the hypolimnion, the under-lake. The water doesn’t shift, doesn’t cycle up to the surface, and doesn’t change like the water of the epilimnion does.
I pay an ice fisherman $25 to let me use his shack for an hour. He makes me promise to call him if he gets any bites. I wait for him to disappear before I attach the amulet to the fishing line and drop it into the water. It hisses as it disappears into the depths.
The fishing line goes taut right before the ice fractures and the earth begins to quake. Some things never change.
A bump in the nose, inside reflection, outside looking up to the sky, I’m kind of high. I hope that’s okay. I jump from cloud to cloud, girl to girl. It’s my world at the end of the day. Hey, I’m just being honest, no reason to lie. My last relationship ended with a punch to the face. I know what you’re thinking, it wasn’t me. I swear I was sinking into calamity. I’m often in the pits of hell. I yell to myself from inside my space mind prison cell. Well, there’s no reason for details. I’m away from the past. It’s time to move on from the last. Still, my face hurts from the punch. There’s an indentation in me, and I can feel it deeply. There’s pain, but I seal it away, steal it away. I don’t care if you’re buying or not. I’m trying a lot. I’m tying what’s left of me into cloud shaped knots. My heart is a pot and it’s boiling over. I go over so much in my mind. It’s hard to find a person these days, but I’m diligent. I promise I try. I cry myself into pool, and drift on the drool.
This month...
Contributions from...
Alice Dillon, Anatoly Loginov, B.G. Smith, Bee Hawthorne, Betty Stanton, Brett Abrahamsen, Chyina Powell, E. Florian Gludovacz, E.J. LeRoy, Joshua Mannix, Katara J. Z., Kevin Hopson, Kurt Newton, Len Slatest, Lilian D. Vercauteren, Lisa Timpf, Lisa Verdekal, M.D. Berry, Marc Watson, Michael Smith, Michaela El-Ters, Natalia Plos, Natalie Bucsko, Nicholas De Marino, Rickey Rivers Jr, Sara Szatmary, Sascha Reinhard, Spencer Salokar, Tessa Were, William Shaw
Cover art
featuring photograph by Vruyr Martirosyan
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I hope you
find yourself at the bottom of a bottle of red wine
look in the mirror and do not hate what you see
swatch purple on your eyes without regard for others
are haunted by morning memories of me
try the spicy foods that used to scare you
lick your stubborn glass plate clean
bury your wounds in an unmarked grave
confine yourself to only burning cities
kiss the sky and then the ground again
clean the gravel from your scraped up knees
lighten the load that lives on your shoulders
know you are always the devil to me
Savannah S. Miller
- My son’s foot when he was born was about half the size of my finger. He weighed less than 3 lbs. He spent six weeks in the NICU.
- Waking up in Adelaide, South Australia to magpies and lorikeets calling and I’d go have coffee on a picnic table and smell the ocean from my back porch.
- Wanting to be a traveler, tramp, vagabond, vagrant, hobo who rides the rails or lives out of a van.
- The moment my heart broke, when I finally realized she’d never love me in the way I needed her to love me.
- The feeling of riding a bike through the morning Irish mist on the Aran Island of Inshimore.
- The way my wife will never see how beautiful she truly is.
- Being in a relationship where you’re no good for one another, but you just can’t quit each other.
- The weight of my friend’s casket when I was 17.
- The morning I walked through the empty streets and closes of Edinburgh, Scotland. Gathering flowers in Princes Street Gardens, and taking the tram to meet my one true love.
- How time stops when driving out to Edisto Island, South Carolina and how every person should find a place where time doesn’t exist.
M.D. Berry