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DECADES SPIN HARD
by J. Alan Nelson My love dwells in the 1990s. I frankly tell you I can’t quite catch her shades with these printer’s inks. I search the links to that decade: devour the meal before resuming the bar exam travel to Russia, resign my post quit the boss that hates me who preaches to make the most of every opportunity skid down Crested Butte on my bicycle, break my ribs against the mountain. My friend declares he was a New Formalist and that my links to that decade have no rhyme nor meter and what a pig of a man I must be to trough my poem with such slop and I say the 1990s is the land of Oz when I am so stricken with grief over the death of my love, the diadem fallen from her brow that I function as a child never question the rise of the internet thickly layered hierarchy of protocol spattered with digital lambsblood. That pathetic decade flew into cyberspace unleavened as the current millennium gyres with subatomic packets of information. My love is dead. I know, and do not know, what death is. Whatever I believe, I know her plot of earth, her hardware rots in that metal box and concrete vault. Long after men forget her name I still brood over her unbelievable life. How I believe, still believe as decades spin hard. |
PHOTOGRAPH by Dallas Harder |
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BLOOD ON THE AXE
by Dianna Henning When a neighbor knocked to alert us our dog pinned a deer to the fence we bolted outside, nailed the dog, dragged her in, shut her in her room; then headed to the fawn on the opposite side of the fence; so Sakari, our malamute, hadn’t been the first threat a different neighbor pointed out, saying she saw a band of loose dogs nail it, the fawn’s stomach torn open. I like to think that our dog tried to pull the injured fawn, for protection, through a window of chain-link fence to the other side—the safe side, as though rescue were sole reason for her keen interest. My husband put down the bleating deer while I fetched a shovel to bury it. All the while I shook, thought of Eros, the winged god of love, how he carried a fawn as my husband now does, the dead pulled through a small window of the living. |
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FOR A MOUSE
by Robert Wooten At my job—and what can I say? I work outdoors in traffic—I found a mouse under a traffic cone with its baby in its mouth, and set the cone back down. Still winter, late in the workday of a January afternoon, I thought to myself, should I report this? No. How it got there, I don't know, halfway between the hedgerow in a traffic island and landscaping at the business entrance. The roar of traffic going around it, I thought you could tell this season by the sound of the heat running in the engines, and thought of Burns and cummings, and all that, and decided to leave it, a mouse rescuing its baby. |
PHOTOGRAPH by Dallas Harder |
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THE AFRICAN VIOLET
by Michael D. Brown You teach flowers To be rare no matter What their disposition. How could you go Unnoticed in a field? I learn when you grow. I love the way you Present yourself to people. I rejoice to be colored Like you |
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