Julian Randall

An arrow does its own form of singing I like to believe
this means nothing is ever too far
from the bird that it was I tender the dark
with a hum we cannot die in a legion
of spells for the Black boys who learned
to make the light sorry All I have ever wanted
is to be the wound you neon
All I have ever wanted is to die beautiful
in hands I could mistake for yours
All seasons are becoming the season
of my isolation The green sputters long
into December so I think we are all less invested
in loyalty these days O you gilded Amistad
the mouth I’d forgive without question froths
with an armada of golden-hulled ships Excess
I too pretty the interruption when I cannot bear
the elegy any longer I don’t know how not to love
what would kill me without noticing I can be
ferocious with my ugly I can be the knife chanting
silver through the abrasion I wish I could write
of you as something that would break if I held it
living for too long O grief-cousin phantom-chain
wind-throne blade-choir What is death to the children
of the forgotten One day too my mother will die
and my loneliness will be a hyperbole of ravens
all of which will sing like fugitives Glory Glory
how much I’ll miss her While yours anthem in the wrong
direction I will probably still love you then Glory Glory
how easy I march in defense of another man who wants me dead

Keith S. Wilson

I love how you never find their bodies, how they never rest their eyes. I love how their breasts are comforters unfolding by their breath. I love that pigeons live in the city, that underestimation never stopped a pigeon from unlatching itself or being old. I want them all unspooling in the air, and bridges that are half sigh and half pigeon. I want to harbor their coo and utilize it for energy. I want to learn to use them the way they want to be used. I want to pigeontail into a quiet night, to let their oddness sit in our hands. You can never know a language until you quiet your own. I want people to write about them. Their leaving ships for land, or standing on their own on a marble statue in the shimmer of a field. I want to talk about the term rock dove, argue over whether or not it's imperialist. I want the media to implicate us in the pigeon problem, for a couple to sit with their asparagus and kids and realize none of this is far from them, whatever we think. I want oils and watercolors and inks. I want still life with pigeons, since not a one has ever been portrayed with a soul: a flight of them around old bread. And how they're all the same. How all the world is here with them in hate, since they are rats adorned with angel wings, and the children down the street are free to chase their drag: they want to see a pigeon's rouge entirely. Let the pigeon have her pigment. Consider the pigeon's brown and green and everything, the brandishing of his nakedness to the sun, as if nothing is absolute. I love the pigeons' shoulders, tongues, and wedding nights. I love the pigeon's place in history, their obsession with living in the letters of our signs. I love their minds, or what I've come to believe is their theology. Who knows? Let the pigeons speak. Ask the closest pigeon for his number, for her middle name, if they are ready to die, if the sky gets crowded enough to consider war, if their stores are closed on Sundays. I want to be ready for them to be just like us, but more ready for them to be completely different. I don't want to waste any time tracing a pigeon's god to Abraham. I want to get started. Some of us feed pigeons. I love, sometimes, our care. I love, I think, the park bench. I love apples, but I do not love pears. The weather. I love the pigeons, the revolution of wheel to sky. I love the newspaper graying in a different air.

Emily Berry

BIRD
I was making my way through the grounds of a stately home which had been turned into a public garden. I seemed to be being followed at a distance by a huge bird, like a heron, but pink, kind of coral-colored. I felt like it was 
mimicking me. I hurried on to try to get away from it and saw a door into a small hut. I went inside thinking I would hide in there until the bird had gone away. The hut had windows at head height so I was able to look out and observe the bird’s progress. I saw it approach another girl, who was with a man, probably her boyfriend. They were crouching down to look into some kind of display case. The girl was dancing, unaware of the bird, which was now right next to her. It started moving in time with her body, but slowly, as if insulting her. Then it moved off in my direction. I ducked down below the window. There was a small bolt on the inside of the door but it looked weak. I worried that the bird would hear me locking it, so I held the door shut with my hand. When I heard breathing I knew the bird was right outside. The breathing got louder. The bird was taking its time to leave. I don’t know how it got in. Its claws were like the claws of a giant insect, pink and reaching. There was one inside me. Deep. I was screaming. It was a very beautiful bird.

THERAPY
There were only two men in the therapy workshop. One was a young man from another country, whose means and modes of self-expression troubled the rest of the group, but we could not be sure to what extent this sense of trouble was prejudicial and based on our poor understanding of cultural mores which in this young man’s country of origin were considered perfectly standard. He was always drawing up overflowing buckets from his deep wells of sadness and then dropping them back down again almost before anyone had got a glimpse of them. At least, that was our guess, because he generally maintained a deep, impermeable silence which had the queasy atmosphere of a lake that was so still as to appear to be a solid, or perhaps a gel, something 
sealed with a film, a film which—one had the impression—had formed through the substance’s fear of contamination through exposure to air.

FISH TANK
I watched a woman in a fish tank shitting directly into a tortoise’s mouth. It was meant to be some kind of spectacle—she was invited to do it and was very happy to, and the tortoise was happy to eat.

Sarah Lindsay

When bones and flesh have finished their business together,
we lay them carefully, in positions they’re willing to keep,
and cover them over.
Their eyes and ours won’t meet anymore. We hope.

It’s one of the oldest rules we mostly follow.
In the deep Stone Age in Shanidar, now Iraq,
someone or all of them laid or threw on the grandfather’s chest
whatever was blooming—
St. Barnaby’s thistle, yarrow, hollyhock...
His was their only burial before the frost.

For millennia, then, the dead might go under with thistle,
quantities of red ocher, a chunk of meat.
Now we have everlasting bouquets of plastic;
now we have hundreds a day to bag and box and pickle
to re-cross the Atlantic.

Light a row of oil wells and kneel
on sand too much embroiled for tombs.
Regrettably, something of the smell
is of bodies suddenly buried in fallen stones.
But some is incense, pinches of pulverized Baghdad rising
in ceremonial smoke:
dust of combatants, onlookers, miscellaneous limbs,
contents of hovels, contents of museums,
ancient pollen of yarrow and hollyhock.

Barbara Ras

If they ask what it was like, say it was like the sea
rolling barrels of itself at you in the shadowless light of the shore,
say it was like a spider, black as night, large as a campesino’s hand,
a deepness that could balance a small world of dirt as easily as a gift
of gleaming red tomatoes held out to you eight at a time.
If they ask you how it felt, say solitary,
at first the ease of sleeping alone, warm without even a sheet,
then the nonchalance of a dirt road leading down the hill, its dust
raised and re-raised in plumes as each guest departed,
and later, say it was like the blind cat that came out of nowhere
to lie on your tile floor, lifting its face to stare with white marble eyes.
If they ask what you heard, tell them the single note of the watchman,
who coughed his one syllable when you went to bed,
and at the end of every dream when you woke with a simple plea—
stay, go—again, the cough of the watchman.
If they ask about thirst, tell them no one could carry water as far
as it had to go, so that when it was time to rest,
people went to the spigot at the edge of the train tracks
and cupped their hands under the water, lowering their faces to drink.
Tell them a man could stand at noon in the park wearing nothing but underwear
and beg for hours with his cup empty.
Tell them you could sit quietly while phrases you didn't know you knew
rose up in the language there and on an undisturbed lake in your mind
you could back float—that weightless prayer that prays
Let me die with my toes pointing up at the sun.
When they ask what people will eventually get around to asking,
How was the food? Tell them batata, mamón, guanábana, maní,
indigenous crops exchanging places with hunger,
giving up to the dark store window whose inventory is one hand
of bananas sold one banana at a time, giving up to little pyramids of limes
by the side of the road and the kids who tend them, dreaming
of a few coins tossed down in the dirt.