Parting

"Stay and sweet and do not prize,

And the light that shines comes back to my eyes,

As day breaks hard,

It is my heart,

Because of you and I might part.

Stay anywhere else my choice will guide."

The Collector

Season 1

Episode 3

The Sign as You Exit the Artist’s Colony Says “The Real World”Aliki Barnstone

Quiet is not silence. Silence is absolute like never and forever. Quiet invites attention to cicadas, the warbling vireo on the wire, the cardinal’s whistle as it wings its brightness over the horizon of the Blue Ridge Mountains, then disappears amid the crape myrtles’ baroque blossoms.It almost speaks to me. / Then as Horizons step, I take a photograph of artists chatting on the gravel path that opens to the studio barn silos.The rabbit lets me come close—It waits upon the lawn / It shows the furthest tree—before it leaps into tall grasses, shelter for fireflies.The limestone statue of the cherubic naked boy smiles down at butterflies and bees feeding on zinnia pollen. Good are those who plant flowers to save our pollinators.Yet I mourn. The air conditioning kicks in. I examine the light on the drainage bed of small stone—a narrow beach outside my glass door—and listen to the distance, the highway sounds rising and falling like wind in spring.A quality of loss / Affecting our content, Emily Dickinson wrote.Before bed, sitting beneath the gazebo’s white dome where there’s cell reception, I talk to my love. We’re interrupted by the long train passing by. Is it nostalgia to love the sound of trains? Is it forward-thinking looking back?A fascist is president: infection in the sentence breeds. We can’t help talking about him.The comedian says people can’t think when they’re afraid. Satire makes them laugh, forget their fear, so they can think, a little newer for the term / upon enchanted ground.Every day more evil against the Earth, the hate cult shouting epithets, hoarding their guns. As Trade had suddenly encroached / Upon a Sacrament.When the artists gather for meals, they ask “How was your day?” which means, “Did you travel in your studio?” which translates into resistance beyond the borders of this quiet estate.

News

Yahya Frederickson

Before breakfast, we drive into town   to buy a Star Tribune for my father,   who usually rides along, but today sleeps late.   From the passenger seat, you stuff  my mouth with a saucer peach. For energy,  you say, my fog before food well-known.   The beige flesh tastes like jasmine.   Honey. A Persian fairy tale.   In his La-Z-Boy near the big window,   my father will read a section, nod off,  wake, read another, all afternoon.   You and I no longer bother—every day   the same: people killing, being killed.   Instead, we cook, clean. We look   after my father, keep our kids busy.  At the One-Stop, I take a copy  off the dwindling stack, set my father’s exact   change into the cashier’s tattooed hand—   my daily deadline met. Heading home,   you spot it first, uphill, in a birch,  glowing, a blue pilot light. A flaming   blue arrow shooting toward us. I can’t   stop, can’t swerve, it strikes our windshield.   I see it in the rearview mirror glance   onto the shoulder. Maybe it’s still alive,  you pray. Maybe we can put it in a box   until it’s well. So I reverse, hope it flies away.   Could I mercy-kill it under a wheel?  Standing by, we watch a wing flail once,   an eye shut, the end. Even a little death  sucks out our air. Where it hit gravel,   one feather sticks up. Such color!   Lapis-and-turquoise filigree.   We kick a shallow grave with our heels,   and deliver my father the news.

Enter Terror

Dalia Taha

translated from the Arabic by Sara Elkamel There is no gift we can unwrap without you.  You are what we need   to make out the trees,   spot an opponent,  or take a stroll through someone’s heart.  Without you, no one would read the same sentence   a second time, breathless,  before setting the book aside  to pace from one room to the next.  And without you, there would be no lines to draw  under striking lines in the books of poetry and philosophy   that now rest serenely by your bed,  after having moved universes;   after changing worlds.  Without you, no one would look anyone else in the eye;   hands would not meet.  No one would photograph the waves that plow into fences,   the snow-capped mountain peaks,  the smiles of children.  Without you, love stories would suffer a deficiency,   and without you  people would not gather on pitch black nights;   they would not light candles or invent lullabies.  Without you, no one would ever know   that stories told in whispers  are the only way to contend with night.   They would have tried swords,  grenades, soaring fences, and surveillance cameras—all this nonsense.  Without you, libraries would not stop us   dead in our tracks,  nor would a flower.   Rocks would be dull.  And without you, massacre victims would not remain alive   to stare us in the eyes.  O terror, without you, poetry would steer us towards nothing.   Without you, we could not fathom the abyss that surrounds us: the universe.  We would never be moved   by its menacing beauty.  O terror: You are the singer’s voice   that travels clearly across the borders   in the Golan Heights.  You are the prisoner; strapped, and mighty   in the morning.  You are the beloved’s name  lighting up, suddenly, the screen in our hand.  There is no gift  we can unwrap without you.

As Life Unfolds

Life unfolds,

Until we are old,

Even after however it unfolds differently.

Sometimes more drastic or less.

Life always holds,The attention of the fortold.

#BENOTEWORTHY

#piccadillyinc

Looking at My Father

Wendy Xu

It’s the inside which comes out, as I contemplate

him there half in sunlight, weeding diligently

a Midwestern lawn. On my persons, I have only notes

and a drying pen, the memory of onion blossoms

scenting in a window. Reflection is my native medium.

I am never arriving, only speaking briefly on material

conditions between myself and others. My country

inoculates me lovingly, over time. My country grasps me

like desire. I will show you my credentials, which is to say

my vivid description, if you ask. Here we are, my father

and I, never hostile, a small offering: pointless cut flowers

appear on the kitchen table when one finally arrives

into disposable income. Still possible. Am I living? Do I

accept revision as my godhead and savior?

I do and I am, and in the name of my Chinese father now

dragging the tools back inside, brow shining but always

a grin, faithless except to protect whatever I still have time

to become, Amen.

Copyright © 2017

NGRI

  

By P. Francis

And the cradle rocks underneath the tendril cobweb

A prenatal breath blowing a blood scab in the ebb

Wooden bars rot, a stained velure crib on a floor

Diseased, wroth rats eating spore ergot in the foyer

Cracked glass is strewn on the dank termite planks

As a mother-in-waiting gave thanks to oxygen tanks

Where window crosspieces rust away in the wind

Glare of specious dust debris recites forgot sins

Down halls, light hides and courts a dark armoire

As debrided dolls cry morts, scarred and charred

No screams carry through the trees of slit wrists

As the asylum whispers in the dusk a nice tryst

Suns rise and shine in the cycles of winter frosts

Whether an asylum or clinic draped in black moss

If nobody's seen alive with babies who maybe died

There's no remorse in a ward or morgue gutted inside

Who screams louder, doctors or uncounted thralls

If no one breathes within the red, bleeding walls?

Paint chips float on through the blue womb rooms

While the pin light hides gone eidolons in tombs

Chairs missing legs crumble into whittled pegs

As outlines of dregs fade in the putrid old beds

Weeping deep at the corridor's dank, blank end

Fillies spank the pretend headless doll friends

Fangs of the shrews sharpened like razors in twos

Guarding the black staircase to the basement and loos

Love and sometimes hate spurned a late night date

As some bane aides and profane insane became mates

Nurses surrounded in gowns down in the jail cells

A gestating, waiting lady and baby to quell

Knives and scalpels raise in swift slicing cadence

Ceilings pouring purple drippings of the decedents'

Then comes a drumbeat drip, from the rafters, to bowel

As the death knells of the dispelled whewl and howl

Dirt and rain water pool in a quagmire of fools

In the flooded sick bay of a failed medical school

Revenants soak in the silty filth, loving the blood bath

No reprieve or ever to leave an asylum's shrieve wrath

Happy Halloween!