Remember Dali’s half-way bodies bent to hide? The flaming animals and the angle-cat baby heterosexual? I almost missed you there in the corner examining a butterfly while the lonely blue dog not yet a monster becomes one.
Undone by C. Dylan Bassett
The body knows things before we know them. It feels them without tongue or need of drum: I knew something was gone from our home before I saw it. The door once party-painted blue (with a butter-bronze blush) was rust-thin and red. I came home, no smell of orange, no cinnamon. Only two empty wicker chairs, a forgotten view, some webbed things…
What I Have to Say by Clifton Bates
My hands are only two tendrils. I need dozens to sign what I have to say. But it’d all fall on deaf ears because it’s questionable what I have to say. Image by: Anders Sandberg
Exploring Sand by Clifton Bates
My guide, bringing up the rear, led me on by not correcting how I went. Image by: Fikret Onal
Cicadas by Chelsea Henderson
It darkens. The sun drowns in the horizon and never resurfaces, leaving us to our hands and lips beneath a charcoaled sketch of sky. Azaleas in white for the occasion, wine humming in our glasses whenever the wind casts a careless hand. For the versions of each other we can’t understand, we offer small mercies— a moon in full bloom, the hollows of your cheekbones…