Single-headed.
Flowering inwardly.
Barely felt in the birth canal.
Medical marketer.
Sick with planet.
By ZACK STRAIT
This is the body, broken for you, the minister says, placing
a small moon on my tongue. I pull it into my mouth
there’s like 30 miles of Volcanic Legacy Scenic Byway then another lil highway
til the lake. the pines fall off occasionally & the pre-dusklight accentuates the
gold in the dust & dirt. dead trees chalk line ones still standing. it’s so quiet iont
have words to describe it properly. Myrrh calls me out for projecting onto this lil
kid i said looked gay & i am proud of them for holding me accountable; they’re
right. we talk on the hike down about the violence that manifests w projecting,
By JOHN FREEMAN
Backlit by the glow
from a small passageway,
he kneels into the fog
of yellow light,
head kissing the carpet.
I step around him,
respecting his privacy, when
the mat becomes not prayer
rug but builder’s tool,
a black piece of tarmac, laid down
before the bank so he could
peer close, fix the dead
motion sensor so that people
with money could
be seen, all doors opening
for them.
Blue, the infinite within a boundary hue.
Edo artists relished its blood-drain
of sea dawns. Westerners learned to brew
from the Virgin’s mantle the brim celestial stain.
By MARCUS MYERS
If our bodies are vessels, hers sailed away.
I am sunken eleven months deep, away from her
hazel eyes like aulos pipers for my oarsmen,
away from her
and then I remember the faint aching hiss of nitrous leaking from the tip of the siphon into the open mouth of me
a hit off the pressurized cream of me
in the darkened storage room round back of the restaurant of me
at twenty-one, the different sounds that rustled in me
freezer hum and thudding voices, conversation concentrate inside of me
who I used to be, was then and then and then: still me
CLARICE
All his victims are women…
His obsession is women, he lives to hunt women.
But not one woman is hunting him—except me.
I can walk into a woman’s room
and know three times as much about her as a man would.
A starling catches me in a dress
and pierces my chest two times,
deeply, and I cannot blame her.
I have read the report—inconclusive.
Yet, I know how much your brain weighs,
your liver, your heart. Your ordinary,
damaged heart. I know it by the gram.
It is so late
it is early, and there, once again,
is that thrilling and disturbing bird
of dawn, its four notes,
one two THREE, four climbing
a little way up into the future
and back down, and once again
everything that’s mine is in a rental truck
or in the future.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.