ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Five Poems
by Sarah Vap


i saw a stork of alcohol you could see through.
                                                   - Lorca

1.

the national butterfly depends

on the lazuli bunting—its simple and brief devout.
the common loon’s scarlet eye

depends on my dream of the heron
pecking my solar plexus—pulling out its copper papoose.

the eagle dreams a rare-blue cup, filled with that mustard seed toward

her guiding form: a snow-
moving river.

2.

prepared for invisiblity, even normal girls—wee misericordias
with a repetition compulsion—

they’ll become birds or are they confused by birds?
if you take a bird,

do you kidnap a woman? the arrival of faith in this hemisphere—well,

the glory went out of saying something bad’s
bad.       postmodernism is far more flamboyantly

flamboyant, like: three stone swans in the snowy yard.

3.

it’s impossible not to know the eagle
or the rose. (what kind of bird? what kind of flower? what

frozen in amber?) three four-year old girls

fingerpaint a butterfly
onto the pumpkin, their pulpy fingers

below the night’s sheet-lighting. now they will wait for the black-light
snowfalls, deep and patient

along their winter nights; snow, mythical like unicorns
falling. how break

the crucibles of their nature; how dig their shelter
into the rain-softened earth.

4.

or, the blessed inptitude of our memory: my sisters
in matching lavender winter-scarves. my catastrophic sister

wrapped up in the string of christmas lights. smeared
halloween grease on her face—was she the pumpkin

with the alabaster cracked

over her shaven cerebellum?—idolatry,
idolatry,              vanquish and coronation.

4.

or, silent night,

peony night.



hemisphere-semi-precious.

grrrrrrr!—the aquamarine-unicorn on my underwear
carries lunatics away. soft-porn, asscrack—these are my matrimonial summons.

records of—

lunges to the wistful-methodical firstborns
and their plumes.

bluebells. blueballs. ballerinas.

corn on the mountainside, a rhomboid-swath

a thousand years old, not like grandfather’s neverending
row in nebraska’s
heartland... give his children something—trafficking in sueños like some

androgynous florida. grandfather’d say it won’t matter in a hundred years, and,
shit or get off the pot.      he’d give you anything— phantasmagoria, extra-

terrestrial—no matter how grandmother’s shawls and eyeshadows were the cardinal

point for certainty.            if lost, we’re to walk straight down one row until
we arrived at the railroad tracks, and wait—this alage

in the incan shower,
puma-face where the sun hits the limestone labyrinth

every morning, and our morning’s affectation.

figurine: a souvenier yemanjá.

she’s water-pearls, and she’s mine—the mermaid-mother

a virgin of the forced conversion driven
to the pietà.

she’s the princessly human-limit
not the queen—with a quantifiable

resolution: how many tropical-fish. how much oyster-shell. where
the shipwreck, the kingdom, her coterie… and how can she laugh most sincerely.

friendly with job’s morning stars, singing together— she twaddles
that catchpenny-forgiver. lax,

debauched sweetheart in a blue swimsuit, sanctifying the wave.
her woolly socks, her underpinnings—           her dreamed-of

gentleman to the wave.

merbabies and goliaths.

pink dance-lesson dress and birthday favors—upon my word and pennons flying—
this is the more beautiful: a feeble arabesque

of millipedes, red ants, and the delicate bee
on marmelade. an enormous bulb of driftwood, sleek stump—

quartz lodged in the grain three times—

how many decades rolling up to this beach, trapped in the arms of the bay.
lavender sandcrabs lose their fear of us while we sleep… bright-blue,

and then trasparent. shoo. vai via!, scat.      hyper
little tags.