issue 3
I want to roll in this moment until I become its vocabulary
until I smell like the bones
until I am its echo…
And then he feels that familiar sensation of drifting—when his body untethers from the material world and he soon dissolves into a fine, floating mist that evaporates into the atmosphere.
Darkness always follows.
Do not say anything anybody else has said ever. Things are not “bleached by sun.”
My mother has been dead for two hundred and forty-three days. I’ve had plenty of things in my refrigerator for longer.
I tap at the alphabet while a single deer
taps at the dirt beyond the brush
on the far side of the tree line.
Should have found a job by now; should have slept in the night;
should have boiled old coffee before noon.
Even as the sun warms the concrete
the long nights’ sensual cold lingers in my clothes.
A tortured simper uncoils itself across my mouth as I open another bottle of Penis wine.
None speak of how the streets collide in coarse seams like scars, the fresh cobbles unable to level with the ones shaken from their mortar by uncountable seasons.
I’d never heard of anyone having a second baby right after the first one, but everything was so strange in those early days of motherhood that I just acted on instinct.