FIRST SNOW. FIRST SOUL. by David Dodd Lee

It wasn’t so much the puppets— They were dead in the sewers hung up along     The curbs— Or even a big wedge of corned beef. I picked up twenty knives before I found one heavy enough Because the heart’s gnarled meat—you know this, right? The flowers Blooming along the windows in the elementary school Blistered like soft blouses … Man looked at herself in…

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Paradox Basin

There is fire on the opposite shore. It is the ferryman burning his oars. There is clatter from the opposite shore. It is the ferryman dismantling boards to feed to the current. He knows what suffices in this canyon. He knows, in all the desert far above there is not fuel enough. Foreshortened, half-lit, already I claw sheer rock and rise. 

Jésus Malverde

No one had seen him. They lifted a face from a televised lineup—statesman or actor, cosmeticized singer—then averaged the features and rendered an image in pastels on plaster. Chalked hominid shapes all over the city, sidewalks impastoed with quicklime and blood. Shriftless, the flock came in droves from the slaughter, trafficker and homicide to his cinderblock altar, and sought the familiar marauder’s composite. Crude figures…

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