ISSUE 28: Winter 2015

Two Poems

Dank sunrise below Pink Mountain.
Down with exhaustion 

Dank sunrise below Pink Mountain. You groan out of your tent, stretching the heels of your hands onto the pad of beige gravel before you swallow the cold or realize maturity isn’t something you can work on. In the bush you find vertebrae in owl pellets and rickety moose calves learning to pull choice branches with their lips. All you can think is, I’d kill for some furniture, a carpet, an uncomfortable desk chair. Living outside for forty-three days, scrambling vague slopes and ringing a dinner bell—the pitch makes you mental. There’s no time except mealtime, no correspondence between words: red rot, bagging out, slash and cache whores. One morning your site’s blotted with clumps of brown fur, reeks like turned earth and saliva. You crawl on all fours, gather up remains to force another animal.   

No one knows I’m gone

In the thick of it you’d brighten

at the sight of me, tracing

the pattern of sternum

bulge beneath my skin.

My insides were the empty hull

of a lode ship for an unnamed

pilot, a conveyance withstanding

heavy seas, memory trick

of white cap / red nose: waiting.

As my body dried out,

I looked for a swimmer—

the waking wet, sleeping wide,

a blonde who wouldn’t russify.

Because I lied about everything

except my height, grave site

and walkyr bloodlines,

there was no safety

between our legs.

You demanded bones

pulled from the context

of flesh, ruins in brine.