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HERE, THINKING OF YOU SICK IN MIAMI by Jack Felice we are in opposite extremities of the country. Outside, mountains are bleached and salted and I hear you are stuck in tropic steam. Each night they talk about how thin you've gotten, how they are worried you might vanish into damp Miami. How you can't visit the city unless escorted, can't flush without proper inspection. And as our family soaks themselves in wine I want to shout to you, down the east coast spinal column, to stop your shrinking. Won't you burn your magazines and doll clothes and come watch the vegetables hatch from the snow? |
DECAY by Ruben Briseno Reveles |
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IN THE SANDWICH SHOP
by Jane Blue Death has slipped in before us into the sandwich shop. Death in a black hooded sweatshirt. Skinny Death. Death sprawls on the glass counter, over the lettuce and tomatoes, his jeans barely held up on his hips. He keeps falling asleep, then waking to choose meat for his sandwiches, shaking his head, no, no. No to the vegetables. The counter server looks startled and impatient, as are any of us in the face of Death. Addicted Death, withdrawing from the obsession, tired of taking so many souls. Death moves down to the cash register and pays the price. He manages to balance a soda and stumble to a table; slumped in a chair he falls asleep and I see a bit of dark face behind the hood. Death wakes twice, sobbing in big gulps, never touching his food. |
DEWY LEAF by Katy Brown |
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CAT BURIAL
by Clarke W. Owens She winds down, like the others, stops curling on your feet at night, loses appetite, begins the dull-eyed stagger. Take her to the vet, the vet minces, "guarded." You pay the last three hundred but she comes home in a box, a package of soft black and white fur, limp, head wet from the treatments. Find her a sack, dig the hole with a pick, lay her in, find a good stone. We'll abandon this place, leave behind a little graveyard where careless strangers tread the modest life we planted. |
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