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CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Three Poems
by Carrie St. George Comer


Dawn Three

A pink bomb
detonates
over the neighborhood.

Peeping out through
the delicate pinwheels of dust,
we agree:

‘tis the sun

shedding a grey hell of birds
as it rises.

Dawn Two

Here in the non-anger, we breathe.
We spend two minutes thinking not, worry saved for the outside,
for the periods of half-sleep, when fear of falling through the mattress
slides down in the jaw, and curls like a worm round a twig
in a hole. If only the person with whom I wake were just a little more clobbered,
had spent a few days staring at indecencies: photos of itself out of bathrobe,
ankle deep in tepid waters, a moth circling as if in protest.
You sleep, a moth at your lips, its wing like an eye through a hedge.
Behind you, an orange forever of hill and stump, and several hours from now
a man walking pale and naked, as if in self-portrait. He wants to touch you.
May he touch you? May he hold you in sleep? May he hold you in death?
You sleep as if inside a pebble, beneath stars tinier than salt,
your breath like rain on sheep hiding in flowers. May he touch you?
(He is asking.) He says the flowers hiding the sheep will change from white to pink,
and grows hard. He says the stars will bomb us to hell,
and purples till a seed issues forth. Inside the seed, a certain someone sleeping,
the lonely sounds of water.


Assemblage

Tail to tail, tail to tail.
When the mouth opens,

one square tooth
sits on the lip
like a bath tile.

Your face is cavernous,
the ugliest little moon

I ever saw.
Dearest, you pale.
Dearest, your hair fills with salt.

Shake it.
Shake it with all you got.