Dissociation
Squish your toes into the creamy sheepskin rug and marvel at how they disappear—swallowed by softness. Sunlight spills through large sash windows, turning the hairs on your forearms golden and lifting some of the intensity from the daffodil-yellow wallpaper in this unfamiliar space. You’re standing with your back to your …
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The Answer for Everything
If the body is indeed composed of mud and fossil, rib cage woven of branches clipped from tired acacia. If the moon pulls back from its seat as planned. If comets pour into one another like coffee from a carafe and the calendar becomes either all-dark or all-light. If …
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Lamentation
After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of the human being getting thrown off course. It’s all one long funeral song. – Bob Dylan The house is smaller than Elizabeth remembers, but the …
Read MoreLetter From the Co-Editor, 8.1
Dear Fellow Readers and Writers, My attention, over the last year, has turned to lichens. My obsession grew slowly, which is fitting, given the subject: Greenshield lichen grows roughly 5mm per year. It began last January when I purchased Flora: Inside the Secret World of Plants and decided to read …
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Butter
Automatic grocery store doors were fascinating to Darin. At least in that moment. The way they sensed a presence (sometimes a ghostly one) and flung their arms open. The way the mechanical doors made just enough noise – enough to let you know they were spreading and yet not loud …
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Anima
So much harmony of limb I knew by being but could not parse it Then when the finch was pecked down to its clear-as-wax-bones imprint sang the idiom these little glowing letters …
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Hyperosmia
Three steps beyond the doorsill, I’m horselike, my nostrils flick; bearlike, snout to sky. To sun-mellowed cement, I carry the scent of morning toast unburnt, coffee uncreamed. I put my nose to slug slime, to aphid lace and fresh spider silk. Test my super- (or sub-) human olfactory skills. The …
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So Many Dead
Bottles with the cap on, drifting on a sea where nothing sinks and nothing opens. Oceans, poisoned by a drink of water. Press-on fingernails dance in curls along the shore. Plastic swirls in eddies of Pacific vast, muzzled phantoms in a pulp, bobbing clear and blue and winking in the …
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Until All the Matches Are Burnt
I am driving to the Grand Canyon on a chilled, moonless night. My headlights catch a small structure on a spit of land fronting a dormant volcano. It is the Chapel of the Holy Dove, an isolated sanctuary amidst a woodland of ponderosa pines. * I wrench the door open, …
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