Issue 05 Poetry

If I Should Tell You

By BREYTEN BREYTENBACH

If I should tell you they come to this place,
those who’d written out their lying lives, that they move
languidly yet deft like butterflies, one by one they come,
a movement in the penumbra, each with a shimmering
shield or carapace on the back stretching from neck
to the fold of the knees,

If I Should Tell You
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Snow as Versions of Different Things (Fargo)

By JON THOMPSON

desire
In the flat uninhabited spaces, snow falls from an empty sky. Here and there, the bare branches of an oak are black against the steadily-falling flakes. When the air is thick with them, it’s not white, exactly, but a glowing bluish-white, shading to grey as evening comes on, darkness in tow. Snow accumulates like loneliness, one snowfall covering the last one, layering into snowdrifts that become the landscape.

Snow as Versions of Different Things (Fargo)
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