c o n v e r g e n c e:
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EDITOR'S CHOICE: cynthia linville's

Linda Collins Alcatraz Infirmary by Myles Boisen

THE END STARTS BEFORE YOU KNOW IT By Linda Collins One moment you are following footprints that trace a path of safety across a stale landscape ground-focused as you place each foot in an exact perimeter of hollowed sand. But one foot lands outside the margin. Your toes slide sideways the edge of your boot brushes a slick stone only it isn't a stone, and before you know it a huge flash paints the air orange glazes it with gray soot. The last thing you see your two best buddies — a stretcher bouncing between them — hopping footprint to footprint across red-splotched sand. You wake up in a German hospital and here's your wife her smile, faked. The end of the bed where your legs should be desert flat. She sits there and speaks of logistics. Rehab at Walter Reed a fitting for prosthetics counseling for you, for her a car with hand controls. It's all mapped out and now you understand that in that split second when your eyes left the ground after some distant crack echoed against the flat, colorless sky every decision was made. MOONLIT MAN By Linda Collins Tonight the moon hides tomorrow. My son said I am coming soon — when we are together I will know what you know. See now, aspens dulled by pallid rays all the leaves are voices the moon hushes their whispering sweeps silence through ghosted limbs cloaks the mysteries awaiting your birth. See how I am changed yet unchanged branches tinged with silvered strands until the milky light wanes and the moon slides behind the earth's swollen curve. FAULT LINES By Linda Collins Here in the midst of high-rises in the square statues point from graffitied pedestals while inscriptions shout voiceless from cold bronze, and ahead where the street stretches out to shining skyscrapers over flashing neon signs lit up inside gloomy bars, and the relentless buzz surrounds everything not moving around the tremor of moving — they say it might be the beginning of survival or something like that. Maybe all the statues point toward what will follow, over the years after the opening of fissures. Linda Collins Linda Collins lives in Carmichael, California, where she strives to make up for too many years of not writing. Her poems have appeared in Late Peaches: Poems by Sacramento Poets, Walrus, American River Review, Poetry Now, Susurrus and elsewhere. She is affiliated with the Sacramento Poetry Center and co-edits its periodic poetry journal, Tule Review.

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