​An Updated Constellation

It’s a pearlescent scribble I’ve traced for myself-
       affixed within its net are caught a thousand stars.

And while this luminous stain assumes far more
       than its share of night, and of my day, it resists

all augury, knows nothing of the future, denies
        any notion of destiny or fate. Instead, it casts

a backward glance along the lonely zodiac -
        outlining loss and flaws, it maps a wistful path

toward regret, glowing in celestial
        self-reproach as its declination diminishes.



​
Bio: Kevin Casey is the author of And Waking... (2016), and the chapbooks The wind considers everything-- (2015) and For the Sake of the Sun (2016). His poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Rust+Moth, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Chiron Review, and Ted Kooser's syndicated column “American Life in Poetry.” For more, visit andwaking.com.

Dread


                Surreal, aquatic, enmeshed with their elements, these haunting images exude both sadness and surrender, to the light, to the water, to the snow, and to the lens. Morey Spellman talks to AHC about his process, his inspiration and what first led him to art and photography.


AHC: What first drew you to art? Was there a specific moment in your life or turning point where it became clear to you that you were being called to create?

Morey:  As an only child I was always motivated to keep busy. I played clarinet for eight years and I ran cross country in high school, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. Although not strictly visual mediums, I consider any activity where you grow a form of creation. You create something from nothing, an idea that turns into reality. 

It wasn't until photography that I found an outlet where I might have more control. Of course looking back, I can only say that practice makes perfect. My grandfather (who is also a photographer) tried on numerous occasions to explain to me more about the craft. However, I didn't become fully invested until the end of high school. 
​

Dune


AHC: Do you have any upcoming exhibits or new projects you'd like to tell people about?

Morey: As for the immediate future, I'll be traveling throughout California for the next few weeks to refresh my mind and create new art. 

​

All images © Morey Spellman (Provided courtesy of the artist)

For more visit  www.moreyspellman.com/

​

            DIALOGUE

            —There is something you’ve forgotten, my friend.
            —I know. There was a book.
                                                               —Yes. Small. Gold-bound.
            —That’s the one. My father’s first, one he found
            on some shelf in a sad ruined house. Then
            he left it to me. Odd story, the end
            came on every page and each word’s sound
            weighed more than meaning. It dropped on soft ground
            and sank. I dug. I searched. Now I pretend

            I forgot its language. To admit
            I’ve misplaced that book-

                                                               —Yes, I understand,
            it would be like playing dice on a grave
            or cards in church. Not the book itself, it’s
            the mistake. You don’t fear your father’s hand,
            it’s a talisman-
                                           —Yes, I should have saved.

​



           CAPITALISM


            Come close.
            I will sell you

            silence

            in small
            doses

            so you won’t
            get scared

            blank—almost
            white

            you will
            enjoy it and

            it only costs

            one breath.

​




​                FORMS

                Variations on an old line

                
                The shape
               Of a surprised mouth
               After the kiss
               Before the wound.

                The surprise
                of a kiss before
                the mouth shaped
                words to wound.

                Before a wound
                can surprise your mouth
                into a new shape,
                a soft kiss misses.

                Shaped to wound
                a surprised mouth,
                you wait for a kiss
                before and after.

​

Christmas Tree 32” by 56” oil on canvas 2015


                  Could you recall every part of your childhood home? What if all you had to remember the place you came from by was your memory? Could you piece it all together, a space lost in flames? In 'The Living Room', a series shaped around the loss of her family abode as a teenager in a house fire, Brandi Twilley does the seemingly impossible work of recollecting from memory the details of that space. The way the television light spilled out onto the floor, drawers half shut, video cassettes under a Christmas tree and the flames that would take it all away. Almost. If we can still remember what is lost does it somehow survive? A mental photo album, perhaps the kind all of our minds keep in one way or another, but one we rarely need to use in this way. Creating out of necessity is a sacred and hard work, and these pieces are up to that task.  Recollection, recreation, and living on, even if only in memory.


AHC: What first drew you to art? Was there a specific moment in your life or turning point where it became clear to you that you were being called to create?

Brandi: Some of my earliest memories are of making drawings when I was very small. I really feel like there isn’t a period in my life when making art-work wasn’t a part of it. When I first began painting though was a significant memorable time. I started painting when I was 15. I worked large right away. Everything about painting was exciting to me at that time. I made copies after the artists that I admired such as Titian and Picasso. I painted things from my dreams and I made renaissance style paintings that are humorous to me now. I painted portraits of my family. I was very uninhibited in a way that is hard for me to imagine now. From that time on I wanted to spend as much time painting as possible for as long as possible.


AHC: Could you talk some about your overall process, themes & inspirations?

Brandi: For the living room series and the work I am making right now I am painting things that I remember that I have little or no record of. I am still making paintings of the house I grew up in that burned down when I was 16. I am forced to work from memory and from imagination to piece things together. At first this process seemed impossible, especially since I am more used to working from life and from photos,-a process which seems so straight forward and easy now. I have felt really lost trying to figure out such things as the shape of a chair I remember or just which way a shadow should fall. I have discovered that similar to working from life where I can compare a painting to physical reality for matching colors and making accurate forms-when working from memory I can follow what aligns with what feels right. The lasting impressions of the way that light streams in from a window that I experienced repeatedly in the years I lived in the space are their own form of truth that I can strive for. I can’t get every thing to be right in a technical accuracy type of way but I can make the painting really feel like what I experienced. When that does happen in the painting it is intense for me since I feel like I have really pulled an image that has for so long been a vague subconscious place that I visit in an occasional dream into the actual world. It is a slow process making the paintings. When I come in to the studio after a few days away I am anxious and overwhelmed and have no idea where to jump in, since the images are complicated and unplanned. I try to find one thing to change and then from there I carefully re-enter the painting.
​

 My Studio in July with fire paintings in progress


AHC: Are there times when you become blocked creatively? What do you do to rekindle inspiration?

Brandi: The best thing I have found is to stop painting and just make drawings. It’s a much easier way to be lost. I feel much more free making them. The relationship I have with drawing is very pure. I just enjoy it and love it and I let myself draw whatever I need or want to make and it’s not so much of an investment. I have deep scars from paintings that haven’t worked out, but drawings just go in the trash and I never think about them again. It is also good to just take a break altogether. I think that it helps to renew the desire to make things.


AHC: Do you have any upcoming exhibits or new projects you'd like to tell people about?

Brandi: I may be having a show with my younger sister, Rebecca, at Hood Gallery, in Bushwick, in March or April. My younger sister makes paintings and drawings of fantasy characters like dragons and warrior princesses. This would only be her second show ever. I will likely show a recent portrait of Rebecca and some drawings from memory of her as a child.

​

All images © Brandi Twilley (courtesy of the artist)


For more visit branditwilley.com/ 

The Tree In The Lake


Fall’s almost over, but the trees here, are still throwing up
their arms in disgust, littering the broken road

with their wet, green tongues, the gutters, full of their broken branches.
Every plant I’ve ever touched, I’ve found a way to kill,

like this Eastern Redbud that lies at my mercy, a hard ball
of woody roots, thick fisted and still frozen.

I am thinking of the first thing I did the day after the election,
a click on a random picture, of a tree growing out of water,

like a trick of the light, or a gorgeous impossibility. I wondered how far down
all of its crooked fingers went, if every wet percentage of my body fell,

and found a groove down its rough arms, broke the wet slap of the lake
and followed it to its end? But seeing isn’t always understanding.

I know I need to kneel for this, to get more ass behind the stake,
to rip strips of duct tape and cinch it, as if tighter is always better,

as if this was something I could save. I want to get back to what matters,
what’s been broken everywhere, but Joe’s wife just died, and Paul has cancer,

his hockey sticks and baseball bats traded for a colostomy bag.
I’m not envious of the lives of trees, bending to the weather, the soon dead

evergreen, dresses made of wind and needles, too tall to do anything
but fall over, crash through the roof, clog the gutters with whatever they shed,

however sick they got, with their frozen rivers of sap, their dark hospital robes pulling back
to reveal their exhausted wrinkles, their nakedness.

30 years ago, behind my mother’s house, I watched them block out everything
but the light, a break I could see through if the wind blew, if I leaned over the porch railing, and
waited.






Work of Hands


I’m taking my ears off again for the television,
buds from headphones shoved into a place where Patti smith is screaming.
Because 2 minutes from a press conference was all I needed to hear
about how the world would end,

with another lie and a pool of piss in a Russian hotel room.
I’d mention its name, but I’d rather talk about Patti again,
how she makes it sound like you have to be broken to sing.
I was 15 when she whispered my name in the language of static,

messy headed and dreamy. Rainy Saturdays, I
laid the needle of her down in my bedroom,
set the world inside me spinning.
By the time the bus arrives, I am 16

and there is no 2 hour delay,
no cancelation to keep the scud missile, school bus yellow
from crashing into the glass door of my adolescence
and a 9th grade classroom to be called names

as if they were curses, as if it was a power they held
over me. I wrote incantations instead of poems
to break their hold, trading sissy and weirdo for 20 years and a
pickup truck, exhaust and college blowing out into muddy jobsites,

Men drinking coffee, running jack hammers, blasting country music, the worst music ever
invented. They stand at break and tell black jokes while I stared into a hole
even darker, but I’m new at this
In the morning, I’ll turn off my truck radio and

go to a place no one wrote a song for yet
where work waits in the freezing rain
in a ditch line, in that dirty boiler room, where a man in a rebel flag bandana
holds a ladder for me, asks if I voted yet.

If I am the leg climbing up,
he is the hand holding on,
my foot on the last rung,
twisting into a place where the pipe always goes in,

where my silence isn’t something that has a name,
and we go on like this without talking, doing this work of hands,

speaking to each other in the mute language of the body
the hunched back, the shaking wrist
this bearing down and turning,
both of our hands on the pipe
wrenching it down, driving it home.

​




What Breaks You


Say it’s because of the house, that you are coming
and your mother’s desperation over the mouse she can’t see.

Say it’s the scratching behind the walls, the shy fist
of its body, bristling past the stacks of cracked dishes,

behind the slow roaster only pulled out for Thanksgiving,
where it’s already made a careless nest of straw, droppings

the withered articles stuffed in the gaps of  the walls for “insulation”.
You think of the soft blonde spiders that used to get in

through broken screens after rain, or the stink bugs that cling
to her vapor thin drapes, the scribble of their legs on your wrist.

You are taking the air conditioner out of her window
because Summer is over, and the grass at last, has stopped dying.

Later, she’ll offer a bottle of water to you from the fridge
and a porch to lean on, with  its chipped railing and drink

while your sister smokes, talks about the kids. The son flunked out,
the daughter’s boyfriend who broke a windshield with his fists.

There is still enough silence here to fill a coffee cup with spent butts,
hold on to what you’d wish you’d say, what you have no words for.

Even the backyard pines are acting like nothing’s wrong, they glisten
with sap and brush the needled dirt with their green skirts,

as if they too, weren’t weighed down by more than the wind.
You watch them, and the curtain parts for two city deer,

and the hushed apathy of their bodies, they saunter,
like teenagers in a mall, cresting the hill just to kick over the neighbor’s birdhouses

thick with seed and spilling over, and you are speechless in your envy,
jealous of their reckless freedom, the sound of their hooves stumbling

awkwardly, against a twig , and suddenly you are 21 again, coming home
drunk in the dark, falling into the door of your mother’s anger.

Not because you were thoughtless, just that you were young
and dumb with discovery. When you are ready to ask about the mouse

she’ll be nodding off in her green chair.
Her hair now, shorn and boyishly practical.

But what breaks you now is she isn’t afraid anymore, that the reason
she called you is lost down some dark hole, to live out its own wild and desperate life.

​

------------------------------
Image - Rachel Sapp
www.flickr.com/photos/rks71794/

           Sasu Riikonen is a Finnish based fine art photographer and film maker. His photographs could be described as cinematic and narrative. They are strongly atmospheric. The photographs themselves do not contain a storyline. Instead, they invite the viewer to interact with them, and to create a narrative between the subjects themselves.


AHC: Can you tell us a bit about your process, themes & inspirations?

Sasu: My inspiration comes from films, nature and melancholy. I’m visually handicapped which has also impacted my work, especially my photography process. In my art I study Finnish melancholy. What makes it so interesting is that it contains both positive and negative elements. It encompasses nuances of different emotions, such as love, sadness, pain and pleasure. Melancholy entails contrast and conflict.

​

AHC: What first drew you to art? Was there a specific moment in your life or turning point where it became clear to you that you were being called to create?

Sasu: I have been doing creative work as a film editor for ten years now. Photography came into my life much later: I started taking photographs after a visit to an eye specialist. The doctor had recommended I get a walking stick, but I walked straight into a camera shop and got myself my first digital camera instead. At first I shot landscapes, portraits, stars and macros of plants, pretty much anything. About three years ago I found fine art photography. Choosing a visual field is a pretty odd decision for a visually handicapped person. When I was starting photography my friend pretty much summarized it perfectly. He suggested I should use the tagline: “Say cheese so I know where you are”.

AHC: Who are some of your artistic influences? 

Sasu: Finnish film director Aki Kaurismäki’s films have been a big influence on my art. I also love the films of Lars Von Trier, David Lynch and Wes Anderson. Gregory Crewdson, Brooke Shaden, Christopher McKenney are photography artists I’m really into right now. Outside of the art world my main inspiration comes from my partner Virva Heinimaa. She has been featured in nearly every art work I have done lately. It’s nice to have a life companion, muse and model in the same package.

 

AHC: Your photographs are richly cinematic, many of them look almost like still frames from a film, how do you technically create this effect (lighting etc.) and what is it about this cinematic sheen that inspires your body of work? I'd almost call them Bergman-esque.

Sasu: Beauty in Melancholy is a cinematic project which draws its inspiration from Finnish melancholy and films. My film editing background has had a major impact on my photography, but also vice versa. I use a lot of photography techniques in my films.

The project’s cinematic style is achieved by using cinematic lighting and compositions. I pretty much always use a combination of soft and low-key light. There is something very mystical about it. The same lighting technique has been used by painters for centuries. Maybe that’s why it looks so precious.

I think the story element is the main reason my work seems so cinematic. I try to create a dramatic situation. To achieve that I imagine a story around a scene. I seek the moment when the mood and drama are at their highest points. I call it a lean forward moment. In a film, you would cut to close up at that moment. As a photographer, I capture the frame at that very moment.

As far as Bergman-esque goes, I’m from Finland, and in Finland, Aki Kaurismäki is where it’s at. So I think it’s more Kaurismäki-esque.

​

​

​AHC: What is the first work of art you encountered that took your breath away?

Sasu: I can’t name the first, but the last time was when I found Gregory Crewdson. That took my breath away like nothing ever before it. I ordered every one of his books in one sitting.


​AHC: Are there times when you become blocked creatively? What do you do to rekindle inspiration?

Sasu: Becoming blocked was a problem for me sometime ago. Then I started collecting a library of ideas. It has made my artistic life much easier. I save my ideas to the cloud so I can access them anywhere. Some of those ideas turn to fine art and some of the ideas I use in films. Actually, the library of ideas has brought up a new problem. I have so many ideas that it’s hard to decide what do to next, so I end up just drifting from one project to another. At the moment I have many fine art projects going on at the same time. This is really something I have to pay attention to in the future.

​

AHC: Do you have any upcoming exhibits or new projects you'd like to tell people about?

Sasu: Lately I have been busy with film editing and teaching. I’m also trying really hard to finish at least one photography project; I’d love to finally finish one, and hold my first photography exhibition. 


​

Galacticka video dedicated to Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of human motion.


All images © Sasu Riikonen (Provided courtesy of the artist)

For more visit www.sasuriikonen.com/
​
Follow Sasu on Instagram

Vivarium

I have the light of you on my mind
a magical mason jar thought
as if I could keep you like a firefly,
gently and viciously punch holes
into the roof of your breathing mouth.

In the house you are more like a habit
I do things like move the furniture around
something akin to branches, small sticks like walls,
carpet as dense as a handful of leaves
they even have the same smell.

I feed you sustenance through plastic and fabric,
linings on the windows are symbolic,
chairs and cold floor comforts;

I think you suspect--
the way you lean across the bed as if
you are a pane of glass
then how your shape becomes the structure
of the interior.





Object Lesson from Nature

I picked up dirt
it was more than me
ground and particulate
fine and blowing, chalky
as a lung in a dust bowl.

It looked desaturated
as light as milk,
crispy, cool as death
ageless because it is depth
not because it has eyes.

I see a jump in the brush
a sage little fellow
blue as a vein. Two tiny legs

to carry it. How it picks
at the rocks and earth,
how it makes a nest
from what has fallen.





Desynchronous

You took me back
which was a love I'm not sure you have
but I like to dream of it, the possibility
of you not being what you are.

I had been away
in what we called jail
but was actually an asylum,
I kept crying over things
being able to go to the bathroom
unattended by fear,

you were kind and took me around
the large mansion you bought, filled
with so many rooms, I could have any one
it was dark and warm like a silent movie
I liked the remoteness and how you could see green
in the windows with the light and the ocean as if it were standing.



-------------------------
Image - Edward Zulawski
www.flickr.com/photos/edwardzulawski/
​

Bio: Penney Knightly is a survivor of child and adult sexual abuse, and explores themes on the subject in her work. Her poetry has appeared in Raving Dove, Broad Magazine, Big River Review, Dead King, Postcard Poems and Prose, and Ink in Thirds. She lives with her family on a sailboat in the San Francisco Bay. She tweets @penneyknightly and shares art on her blog http://penneyknightly.com.

                  Jovana Rikalo is a fine art and portrait photographer from Serbia. She aims to create unreal situations in the real world, images that may look unnatural but that nonetheless feel very real, surreal stories all told through the lens of a camera.


AHC: What first drew you to art? Was there a specific moment in your life or turning point where it became clear to you that you were being called to create?

Jovana: I've always loved photography. As I was studying law, on the second year I bought a new camera and started exploring photography a little bit more. After that I took many photos of my friends and family and I realized how strongly I really felt about it. Then I bought a canon 600D and that was my first professional camera. Today, I can't imagine my life without photography, it's my passion and my love.
​

AHC: Could you talk some about your overall process, themes & inspirations?

Jovana: Before I take a photograph, I imagine in my head what the image should look like, I imagine the situations I would like to create, the characters, and I always write my ideas down on paper, it's easier, sometimes I draw what I want to create with that idea. My inspiration is female models, their beauty. I love shooting models with unique faces, blue eyes, freckles. Also, my inspiration is life and dreams. I follow many other photographers who really inspire me.

After a photoshoot I use my favorite tool, photoshop, to create a finished image. It requires a lot of hours and effort and time to create that image, that means that I am spending usally more than 2-3 hours per photo, I am a perfectionist when it comes to an image, I love that everything in a photo can look perfect, just the way that I imagine it in my head. 

​

AHC: Who are some of your artistic influences? Is there anyone outside of the art world whose work has impacted your own, or who just generally inspire you, writers, filmmakers, musicians etc? 

Jovana: I love Rosie Hardy, Oleg Oprisco, Lara Jade, Katerina Plotnikova. Their work never fails to inspire me!

​

AHC: Bodies of water often figure heavily in your fine art photography, is there a special, elemental meaning in this for you? Some of your work also has an almost fairy tale, dream like quality, do you see some of these works as modern day fairy tale portraits-stories?

Jovana: Yes, I do. I am very inspired by dreams, I love creating dreamy, surreal photos, I love telling unreal stories in a real world. 

AHC: What was the most difficult piece for you to create, shoot, technically and conceptually? Have you ever had to abandon a piece because the elements just weren't coming together in the right way?

Jovana: Oh yes, I abandon most of my images because I had an idea in my head but the right circumstances weren't in place. I didn't make it but I still look on that as a challenge for next time because I know I will make it better next time, I know precisely what didn't work the first time around. I'm still keeping 2-3 ideas in my head from 3-4 years ago and I am waiting for the right time to create the pieces. The most difficult piece was  definitely a couple standing in a big balloon because there were 2 people in these balloons  and I was shooting for almost an hour.

​

AHC: What is the first work of art you made that took your breath away, looking back on it? 

Jovana: The "Guardian" image. That was my first image and my personal favorite. A crow standing on a girl's head in black and white. 

​

AHC: Are there times when you become blocked creatively? What do you do to rekindle inspiration?

Jovana: Yes, I had moments when I didn't have any inspiration for months, but thank God, I always write down my ideas when I have an inspiration hahah. I already have 3-4 pages of ideas in my notebook.



AHC: Do you have any words of advice for young photographers-artists who are rooting around in themselves trying to find their own internal artistic vision?

Jovana: Always be yourself and don't be despair if you don't have a good camera. A good camera doesn't always mean good photography. You only need to have an eye for the idea and to be able to feel the emotion of that idea deeply.

​

AHC: Do you have any upcoming exhibits or new projects you'd like to tell people about?

Jovana:  Two of my photos will be exhibited in Krakow, Poland this march and I have a few upcoming projects but those are a secret.



All Images © Jovana Rikalo (Courtesy of the artist)

For more visit jovanarikalo.com/

​

A Soft Opening

We were in the work house; I remember that.
You said someone has brought us a black forest cake.
And I kept thinking you said someone has brought us
a black forest. And the room became a wealth
of dark shadowy branches and then wetness from rain-
the eerie moon too shading inside the latched door.
My love for you that year was overwhelming-
always calling out for help. Taking you
from your bread leavening duties
and your slaughtering of the chickens.
The knife in your trembling, gentle hands
was like the wondrous silver in your voice.
You were asking if I needed a ride to where my care
would be more severe. And I saw gray metal walls.
A radio of dreary fuzz and distant ocean storm warning
tranced wildly in the lungs of my lonely breathing.
And then I became sadder, knowing
just how far away I had always been.






​Fallen

I had this dream that I was alive again.
And afterwards, I called you from the nearest payphone.
You laughed a little, saying, Okay, maybe we'll see each other
again. Then you let yourself breathe softly for a while, 
which I think had something to do with sadness.
The breaths more and more like a song. 
But I didn't tell you this, or ask why. 
I just listened to your radio fade-like humming
melt into the washout rain until the downpour thickened
even more and drowned out the dial ring of your hang up.
And still, I kept speaking within the neon blurred glass.
I kept holding the red phone closer to my mouth as though
somehow that would help, as though you could hear me
while faraway and sleeping—hear me say
that I am sorry and how lately I’ve wanted so much
for it to be true that we really could be born again.
That in my repentance, the Lord would take all my shit 
and bathe my body into the clean and everlasting.
And maybe too, you would have heard me say
that I had forgotten how gorgeous this part of the city was-
lights from the gray parking garage illuminating into bronze
all the wet rose bushes and arches of alleys, and even
reaching into the frosty river of night traffic bridges.
Or, maybe by then it had begun the hour, 
where all were awakening.





​Arise

Welcome the new generation who won’t buy
into the less is more. No more is more.
And I want more all the time. I want to swallow
lights emitted from NASA satellites, so I can feel
myself glow in the darkest far away spaces and connect
to constellations rotating over where you dream.
It’s amazing how the more I fuck it all up
and so many bad years that fade by of just driving,
myself, alone through congested highway traffic
closed off from anywhere to go, the more I put
my faith in something good to come. Like I swear,
in one of these strangely blessed years ahead,
there will be a night where we find ourselves resting
within one another in some lonely but beautiful city—
majestic red bridge tunnel and silver river running
through. A city, where people still count themselves
to sleep with lovely things of sheep.
One shepherd leaving the fold of ninety-nine
for the lost and maybe very sad, hurt one.
One thousand and nine dusks of lamb wool-
like sky promising snow and closures to the places
that have not enough warmth for us, not enough
a clearing to lead us in through.




Bio: Michelle Askin's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Rust & Moth,
The Meadow, Hopper Review, Lindenwood Review, Up The Staircase, and elsewhere.
​Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She resides in Northern Virginia.

around about sixty-five


the conversation has frozen over on the irregular footpath. he’s misplaced his gloves and  
forgotten the word for I. it was something else in the language of his youth but no one speaks that
now even the young have different rags to clean their boots.

the weather has cleared. there are no circumlocutions on the horizon and no purpose either. the
numbing process has begun and he wonders how it would feel to whistle his breath away.

he wonders if he could be dreaming but decides against it. the cold sharpness in his rib cage. the
stiffness of his stache are reality, he tells himself. Then he remembers a friend telling him you
can't dream your own death, you wake up first.

he wonders if that friend is still alive and if so where.

he has forgotten the name for friend.

he wonders if you can die in your dream unaware. or if you’re safe so long as you know it’s a
dream you’re dying in. or if every dream is a death of sorts.

he wonders what counts as dying these days.

the river has not frozen over entirely. but it’s not going anywhere either. there’s a plane overhead
and some mantras are being expelled from a ramshackle barn. they keep their heads low and do
not acknowledge their angry master. it’s a sullen kind of praying that they do.

not so for him who has forgotten the words for prayer. he eyes the ice needle horizon knowing it
can’t be threaded and follows the footpath into a flock of nonsense that scatters before it can be
stalked into thought or expression.





Sunset in Morning


The sun came up under the footbridge.
Admired its face in brook. Sang.

Fell in love with himself all the way
down to the muddy fundamental

Past the catfish and frogs.  Fell
beyond the cellar of the world.

Broke and shattered in candles
no bigger than bus tokens. Sang

Until one by one the tokens all
went out. Sank to the absolute

Bottom of the things where shadow
clocks gobble up sunshine and song.

​



Revisionist Wedding


It was all memorized at once and at once forgotten. A shattering of memorabilia fragile as mom’s
figurines taken out of the breakfront and confronted in broken. Forgotten and erased as rapidly as
tape at once erased and overwritten. A reconfiguration of memoranda in a new medium.
Memory loop reworked and replayed at once.

He came to regard all his memories as falsifications.

His sister showed him her wedding photos. See. You were there. Who else would it be? But he
had no memories of the midnight blue tuxedo, the altar, the conga line behind the country club.
Later, he had memories of the wedding photos but still no memories of the wedding.

It was all memorized at once and at once forgotten.

Too much had happened, he told himself. The wedding had been overwritten. Besides, it had
ended in divorce. She was married to someone else now. Someone taller.

His dead lover, now called partner, would have become a husband if he had lived. Only now he
only appeared nameless in dreams and that only rarely. In the most recent dream he was a guest
at the sister’s wedding, welding figurines on top of the wedding cake. But he couldn’t have been
there. Because the wedding was long before he made his entrance in the locker room and the
dream long after he made his exit in the hospice.

A reconfiguration of memoranda in a new medium.

Then the dream became memory and lasted long after more substantial and melodramatic
memoranda had been obliterated. Except in the memory the welding torch became wedding
march and the cake became a coffin.

He wished he could photograph his dreams and mount them. He wished he could share them
with his sister. He wished his dreams could overwrite all memorabilia and memoranda. He
wished he could weld the memory loops into barbed wire fences to keep the anger out.

A shattering of memorabilia against the sea wall. And overwritten.

​