ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

How Cold Is It?

1.  I was used to being red.
Soft hands on top of snow.
Then in snow. A mistake.
They thought I might
like to do that.

2.  I pinched you.

3.  Your nose has been
ahead of you.

4.  That was the last time
we matched.

5.  Keep track of the
footprints. You said that,
but not aloud. Let's talk
so the trees won't hear.

6.  Now even the bricks
are white. The sidewalk is
chalky. We throw salt at
almost everything.

7.  If you stand in the
middle of the lake you
won't fall through.
In a car you might.

8.  The edge of the lake
isn't what we expected.
I see grass in one place.

9.  You are not the blaze
on the other side of the lake.
There are kinds of mistakes
that are fiery (I don't think
this is one of them).

10.  We wait for the color
to change. For example...
the sun goes on without us.




Every Year Is the Interior of the Year Before It
          after the painting "Interior" by Vilhelm Hammershøi

Try not to laugh when you remember the fight in the car.
Remember lying on the back seat wishing your teeth would fall out.
She walks by and says, That's a strange one.
We realize we shouldn't yell—
the keys we have been given don't work.
You can't get to the interior without already living there.
I worked in front of the doors for two weeks, but never got in.

In response to the statement, he said,
Why and You keep moving.
It is better to stare at the back of her head.
Black hair, brown table, a heater in the corner and two closed doors,
each almost white. She doesn't really want to go in.
You could read the folds of her dress.
She has a small waist.
The doors do matter, if only because they are interiors themselves,
the centers of trees, and eventual keepers of children and husbands.
But we are let in, enough to sneak up on her.
I wouldn't mind her neck. It is the interior of movement.
She says, You won't find anyone that way.
This is the center.
The hard mistaken part of it.



Along the Water

We weren't exactly quiet there.
Our shoes broke branches and patterned the shore.
We sunk into the seaweed deeper than I thought we would.
I could hear him breathing. He must have heard me too.

It wasn't the dark in the middle of tall trees or the
dark of standing in a room with someone else's furniture.
We were small next to those first watermarked rocks.
I wondered, what kind of rocks call people to shore?
Which kinds of land promise the most to those who were lost?
What kinds of water stalled Odysseus?

The sky isn't always the same, is it?
It's necessarily quartered and re-fractioned for each set of eyes.
I want to believe that I see it best—that it's pink for me or for one other
         of my choice.
I told the water. Now be quiet like that.
Make me think you are chilled glass or a mirrored souvenir.


Here's the universe ordered.
But we're still the larger version of fish.
We jump near the wooden dock.
We remember the far off rock that cut us.
It wasn't the shelter we thought it would be and
we know that the boats stopped moving because they were made to.