ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Three Poems
by Kirsten Kaschock


Positional

the candy was in the milk
and on the first day
you strained yourself for it
through the cervix

your heart is now
in the refrigerator next to the olives
a chart there calculates
what you are capable of

the boy you loved is inside
the girl you hate
often, irrevocably

the table is in the chair

the chair is in the plan
the floor inside the lantern
influenza is in the syringe
winter—inside the flowers

this may serve to exasperate
but you deal yourself cards
and play toward anyway

the statues are in the water
swimming         the Coliseum
in a fishbowl

the fish are in a basket
they are dead but don’t
get maudlin, they were fish

the book is in the thing
the thing in the market
the market, inside world history

world history is inside
the prison you are free
to move about            laugh here

beyond this—the eye swaddled
in glass
dreams fracture, no?

Gallery of the Daughter
                  after Man Ray

Theatre

I can’t talk to you
about the archangel. She said.
We sank even further down into the worn velvet-esques.
She whispered under the soundtrack of the re-release. She said
I’d give a thousand dollars to see him fly.
She didn’t have anything like that
on her. She was sunburnt all around her spaghetti straps
and she spat a little when she recounted a vision
because she hurried.

The rope dancer accompanies herself with shadows

You might think this is about
the circus. You would call it an allegory.
What if rope means pills? What if dancer
is mother? I’ve had some success with numbers
up until now. I could tell you 9 and 17,
then 22, then 38 and already in, out
of hospitals a decade. What would you
make of it? You should know
she was loving. No one asks that.

Dancer (Danger)

Tremendous. The oak’s height
and the sturdy make of branches it offered up
to climbing novices. When we walked by the cloister
on the way to the bus-stop she would
squeeze my hand and say how sorry she was
for that poor tall boy, locked behind
stone with thirty doddering goddies.

The twenty days and nights of Juliet

Let’s just say
the first time she left
I was unprepared for her turmoil of return.

Coatstand

That event deserves another go.

She got on a bus into the Midwest and woke
two and a half weeks later in a motel in Dubuke
in somebody else’s clothes. She had her wallet,
a blond wig, and menthol cigarettes
she started smoking then and
for the next five years.

Policemen brought her home
filthy. The doorbell
woke me, I was not old enough yet
not to be sleeping well.
I held somebody’s gnarled rabbit-fur stole
for an hour while she made and drank her own tea.

Indestructible Object

That would be her daughter.
That would be me. I am her daughter.
I am a liar. That would be her daughter.
That would be a lie. I would be her daughter.
If she would have had a daughter, I would be
that daughter. No, that would be a lie. I am
in truth a march of lies. Or wait—is it
I am unmarred by truth—

Instructions From Your Salvation

This is my Resurrection Moniker—
the name you must call me in order to be raised,
the list of acts I’d like you to perform.

           Ransom.
           Efficiency, but skimping
           realize thick hymnals will fill with hieroglyphs.

I do not want you to imagine you will fit into grace easily.
There are bound to be feet. Toes or heels lopped.
Maybe a hacking at the knee, you dromedary.

           The chosen will not be looked at through the eye.

And as I inserted your application just under
razor wire, the chosen may not recognize you.
Hearing the whistle
           jump the nearest back and grab fitfully, shirt.

Your woman will make it to the border, even with
the weight of you and the children.
You will not have known this about her.

            I am your woman. You will not have known.

Breakfast is clay ground to porridge
by mastication. I can do this for you, have done.
Now you must do something.

            Rampage. Brief, holistic wars.
            38-aught-6. Iota of crouch.
            Field-plate, arachnid, campfire.

This begins our code. Once you break it, the surf will rise.
And me all around your ankles—salted and desultory.