ISSUE 28: Winter 2015

General Preamble

They looked and knew what was wrong. Your face designed to break and break again on illness.

 

They looked and knew what was wrong. Your face designed to break and break again on illness. Blood and alcohol the rural isolate you wear as helmet. But skin-masks envelop grief-masks. More blood, alcohol, and always need to look at. Your face immerses except for wonder, baptismal fonts troubled by your father with the face of icon, who presses his own face to an oilrag and transfers to you his terrible sainthood. The Saint of Fear: Nicholas of Myra.

You learn a rictus grin for all goodnights to chasten the tongues that chide teeth, a sound that mimics the closing of gates. Blame is the function of your face. You are here, wanderer, to be known by how you come. If we welcome you, it is because we take your face and emblazon our flags against your cause, a cause so plainly seen. To be free! But you cannot be, for your face is pain’s currency. Others spend it for you.

Not proud, nor revenant of the self, a woman taught you first and best that dreams of death are madly coming true, squandered is the dream.

Look at yourself and know that the common went predictably wrong on some beginning ago. A line to comprise a face: the fire was want. But it’s not true. Fire melts a face and makes it into what fire wants: the reformation of burn.

You are free to yearn as your face coils, recoils, falls, and resurrects. Look one last time. Take the oilrag. Press it there.