​Alexander Rabb CC




​I'm not going to pretend to have the right words for much of anything right now, but I know this much to be true; I survive through the stories, poems, and visions you have each shared, here, at this home at the edge of the world. The beautifully broken way that you see the world, that feeling of; "hey, I know this place - I've been here too before, I know what it's like to need to make that call and not have the quarters." Have we not each, at some point, been lent what we did not have on us, the kindness of strangers, a wild and endless kind of faith?

You all add something (a kind of light's light) to this world that cannot be reduplicated or broken, no one can do what you can do, can offer what you have to offer. Strength, experience, hope; it's forged through the fire. We wish it were otherwise, easier, but the story almost always asks for blood. 

That's the beautiful thing about art, just when we think we cannot possibly make sense of where we've been and what we've been through, we close a book and put it down in a place called home. A wind battered place inside us that was waiting for words just like those found, here, in these pages. Lodestar language, that you may know you are not alone. Not entirely, not always and forever.

It is okay for there to be in this life such a person as you are.

Welcome home, friends. 

James Diaz,
Editor-in-chief
Anti-Heroin Chic

                      Jeff Ruane CC

​

                        Jeff Ruane CC



Song Dogs 

When I was eleven, my mother wrote a letter
to her father requesting he stop
molesting her daughters. His father taught him
not to drill deeper than two inches
when tapping sugar maples
for fear of reaching
the heartwood. How such a small distinction
can do so much damage. Anyway, the letter
worked. He became a skin-eating
ghost of his own house. Died grasping
for his aortic root
like the unspared rod. Spring
goes on and on here. Rain falls. Buds
swell. Robins flood the yard. The river
has no time for laughter. Fog tangles
in the tops of the mountain’s ciders
like an unwanted crown. Little hurts.
Like the time I closed my fingers
in the truck door and could only say
her name. Blame
between women is tricky like that—promises
a sturdy architecture, but only gives you
a paper floor. Two nights in the past month
I’ve heard a pack of yipping coyotes
surround the house before their own voices
spurred them on. I’ve drowned and dredged
up so many chapters of myself
just for the sake of the retelling. It’s a joke,
though. I’ve never been on either end
of a snake whip. Never had to save
the thing that devoured
what I loved. Never had to beg the way
​the women before me had to beg. 

​

                       Jeff Ruane CC



On his deathbed, my father, who I haven’t seen in ten years, offers me homemade moonshine 
​

Did you think it would come to this? That you’d be begging
the mirror you stuck your fist through
to put itself back together. You can’t
stitch glass. You can’t call home.
You can’t love just one part of a person. 

After this, I’ll know how things leak, that death
begins in slow drips. Your body will go down
a shower drain one yellow drop at a time. 

Ingredients of moonshine: 5 gallons of water, 8.5 pounds of cracked
corn, 1.5 pounds of crushed malted barley, a pinch
of yeast. Foreshots and heads: pray that you distill past the threat
of blindness. Hearts: ripe as years bloody
and beating on the branches of an apple tree. Take more
than you can consume and the whole bushel rots.
Tails: you’ll know when the sweetness runs thin, slick
to the touch. Feints and cuts. Set these jars
aside for an uncertain future.
 
                 After this, I’ll love and leave five men
                 in two years. After this, I’ll check the underside of my mattress
                 for mold from the sweat of all their bodies. I’ll count
                 the rocks on the bottom of a dive bar
                 bathroom floor. After this, I won’t be mad. I’ll learn
                 to save my anger for those willing
​                 to fight back.

​

                      Mayastar CC


​

Parking Lot Politics

A heap of gulls moves as one, 
shitting on the same car brings them closer together,

white peppered on the hood–
what do you call an offender before it hatches?

Move so quick like someone’s coming,
push past them and walk over them–

if they are waiting, they are already dead.
Some of the birds had blackberries–

violet splatters baked onto pearlized gunmetal,
they cackle and grin for they are nourished.

Do men go to night school for gaslighting?
Are there scholarships for sociopaths?

We are turning red on our lawns and our t-zones,
scorched warrants on our front doors,

What’s the statute of limitations for not testing a rape kit?
10 years paid leave and weekly handjobs?

Why is James Franco still working? 
Instead of Yes, and are we saying Yes, but?

They don’t need a warrant,
so where can we go if we can’t go home?





Stand Under A Door Frame

big-handed man walks upstairs and needs no rail,
he recycles dishwashers and blows guys in parking lots,
he wears a chain around his neck and under his shirt–
he loves harmless secrets, he loves sleeping in and 
getting fired, he loves trying again.

big-handed man rolls his own cigarettes, brown confetti
circles around protecting him from himself,
he gets tested– for the most part, when it counts,
when four-lettered panic starts at the bottom and walks you
into planned parenthood, but makes you foot the bill.

big-handed man has favorite shirts and favorite people,
he’ll take you to restaurants that don’t list prices 
and get you the lobster because he just cares that much,
a whole shell packed with meat you have to work for,
immersion therapy for empathy.

big-handed man can do this thing with his lips
where he says your name and smiles
like everyone should know you are the martyr of the year,
there you two are– holding hands,
standing two inches apart– glossy cover and all. 





Reasonable Doubt

you file your nails into the shape of almonds–
I am always needing more protein in my diet.

a man told you that he would make you a star,
get your song on radio and make people know 
your name, in the same breath, he said his address.

good feels good until I am eating meat again
and replying to messages on tinder,
parasites always find their way in.

when he hangs out in malls, don’t trust him.
when he looks at you, don’t trust him.
when he offers you something, which he will, don’t trust him.
when he doesn’t ask your age, don’t trust him.

it’s as if men were expected to marry heart disease
not simply for salt and sugar and poison,
but because it’s tradition, all your fathers before you
married diseased hearts, attraction runs in the family.

what doesn’t kill you can make you stronger
if it isn’t still holding you down.

​


Hailey Knisley has been published in Luna Negra Magazin and Seafoam Mag. She lives in Akron, Ohio and is a graduate of Kent State University. In her free time, she enjoys sitting next to her dog and reading tarot.
​

                         Mayastar CC



I CAN’T WAIT FOR THE GNASHING OF TEETH 

I CAN’T WAIT FOR THE ROCK AND THE HARD PLACE, I CAN’T WAIT TO BREAK THIS
CIRCLE OF SALT, LEAVE YOUR UGLY CLAY DOLL OF THIN BLOOD FOR A COSTCO
MOTHER IN A LIVE LAUGH LOVE T-SHIRT, I CAN’T WAIT FOR YOUR EGGY EYES TO
WEEP AND RUN AND I CAN’T WAIT FOR MY MILKY LEGS TO BURN SLOW, MY
BRONCHIAL SPASMS, MY CRYBABY TRIAD AND PATELLOFEMORAL UNEASE, I CAN’T
WAIT FOR KETOSIS AND KINDA SORTA MAYBE TO MEAN, ABSOLUTELY! I CAN’T
WAIT FOR ALL THE MOTEL BIBLES TO CATCH FIRE ALL AT ONCE AND MY SCARS TO YAWN
WIDE LIKE UGLY LITTLE MOUTHS SCREAMING HEAVENWARD AND I CAN’T WAIT TO
PRETEND YOU MIGHT CALL ME ONE DAY AND SAY “I WAS NEVER A MOTHER” OR “I
​COULD BE IF I TRIED”. 

I CAN’T WAIT TO MEET THE RAT KING AT THE WESTFIELD MCDONALD’S WITH NO MILK
OR SUGAR, NO McABSOLUTION OR McREPENTANCE. I CAN’T WAIT TO BE A
GRACELESS HAG THE REST OF MY LIFE, A WRETCHED WASTE OF SOFT AND GIRL,
THREE BROKEN COFFEE MUGS AND A SWOLLEN WRIST IN ONE AFTERNOON, THESE
THINGS I BREAK THEN SWEEP ASIDE, I CAN’T WAIT FOR MY OSTEOPOROSIS, FOR
YOU TO SPLIT THIS MISALIGNED PELVIS LIKE WISHBONE, I CAN’T WAIT TO KISS THE
BOTTOM OF ONONDAGA LAKE, I CAN’T WAIT FOR HYPOTHERMIA TO PLAY THIS
NERVOUS SYSTEM LIKE A PARLOR TRICK, THIS WINTER RAGE LIKE INFERNO ALL
AROUND ME, FOR THE FROST TO HUG EACH CELL SO TIGHTLY. 

I CAN’T WAIT FOR MY HUSH BABY HUSH MONEY, I CAN’T WAIT FOR MY CELLULAR
TURNOVER, FOR THE RAGE TO RUN ME THROUGH LIKE BROADSWORD, I CAN’T WAIT
FOR MY MUCUS WARM AND YELLOW IN MY THROAT, THE MEAD AND THE HONEY AND
I WANT TO KNOW WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO GET TO THE POINT ALREADY, BREATHING
IN THROUGH THE NOSE AND OUT THROUGH THE MOUTH, WAITING PATIENTLY FOR
THE GREAT STRIP TEASE, A BREATHLESS BLUSHING MOTIF BEHIND EVERY VEIL
WAITING TO BE LIFTED, A HEADACHE WAITING TO RUPTURE, STIGMATA WAITING TO
MANIFEST, I CAN’T WAIT TO BEAR WITNESS TO THIS DYING WORLD WHILE I CAN STILL
WEEP. 

​



a litany of scraped knees

i got to sit in the front of the truck
and
i got to kick the big red ball
and
i got to lick the pizza grease from my fingers
sit criss cross applesauce and
let you teach me how to play Resident Evil
teach me how to pour peroxide on scraped knees
teach me to stop crying,
these rules of the playground
rules of the body, rules of the street,
teach me psychic wounding, teach me,
toughen up 

i wasted
i wasted
i wasted three psuedo-boyhoods
because i let my body
go soft like ripe fruit
because i listened when
they said
stay pretty and bite sized
and can you can you
can you
make your ruin more accomodating? 

i think of hell as a tangle of limbs and
tobacco sweat and i think of heaven as the same, same but different,
how different?
how different am i from my sister?
sister with honey hair, and
blue eyes and so much like my father which is to say, 

not like you 

which is to say you,
Bastard,
you, 
Homewrecker,
which is to say i became
fluent in the language of apologies,
an altar for someone else’s sin,
learning to turn this body inside out
into something you can't touch 

i rinse my mouth with the promise of something better
that will probably just be something worse
i rinse my mouth with lake of fire
and prickly pear
and the metallic taste of misery 

think of my body as a strip mall between
forest and interstate,
think of my life as the same grocery stores in different states,
lost coats and stray dogs, the textbook concept of
attachment theory 

i think of Hell as i think of Heaven as i think of Hell as i think of
i think of i think of
tangled limbs,
climbing into my own hunger like it’s strength
crumpling into my own body
my own wasted girlhood/boyhood/girlhood
i think of being a hushed pearl tucked away in our mother’s ovaries again
and a dream she won’t regret yet


​
​
Daliah Angelique is a Pisces moon homo and steady birth companion. She currently resides in San Diego with her wife and chihuahua, studying sociology.

                           Mayastar CC



​
Dear KJ 

Kylie Jenner, 

I wish to oh so lightly/restore your baby face bones and/ hoover back the false fat
which/no doubt glistens beneath your chops/ in rows of golden globulets/ a repenting
of/ zygomatic proportions/you, gentle bewildered cow/ eyeballs untenanted and juicy/ O’
Maiden of the Mouth/your labial encouragingly discomforting/ the rinds of peaked pink
popularity/ is your symmetry now k= 0/ and so on/ such a cramped body pinata-ed with
plastic/I want to burst you/ dismantled in satiny chunks aglow with irrelevance/ but then
I see you with your new babe/ your little sugar daughter/ corrupted philtrum on fire with
love/ and I think/another saint in waiting/ immolation orgastic, exposed/ a martyrdom
​most sacrosanct/ slippery with sparkles

​
​

                          Mayastar CC



Misplaced Resentment 

The obscene genitalic protrusions of my houseplant fill me with strange misgivings. The leaves, 

can we call them that?, rise up erectly, each rimmed by urine-yellow borders. The forgotten life 

sits baldly and without preamble on a coffee table. Each leaf is too upright, animated by some 

starchy backbone unseen to the eye. Almost spiny. It is somewhere between water-drinking and 

cactus, but I’m not sure. One of the leaves has mutinied and has tipped over in a dramatic 

playing-dead pose. Then, another. They are falling like judgments. WHAT DO YOU NEED, I 

ask. That the fallen leaves are dead is unambiguous and nearly insolent- the state change from up 
​
to down. I pour water over it, filled with resentment. 

Which reminds me of going to see the flowers, the other day 

Fat, pink indulgent faces 

Rising from pollution-soaked meadows 

Grossly beautiful, I wanted to merge 

Except the flowers get a little closer, and then they go further and further away 


No matter what, it is all: 

Fast. 

the project undertakes turning solid to save time 

And: 

The garbage won’t get out. 
​
I really can’t tell you enough.

​




Email Subject Lines Sent to Myself From Myself 


To tell Cuong:
Vegan,
not perfectionist vegan
Tofu scramble.
Psychology Carrot Cucumber tomato
Holy shit living arrangements
Plans, dream 

Ask Cuong to bring:
Souvenirs
for people ACT mouthwash
Chargers 

Cuong asked me where the goa poem i wrote was 

Keep in touch with:
Bell hooks psychic mutilation men
Tattoo: Apollo and Daphne
Dear Polly advice
Breathing, affirmation, smile, moxie,
Skin. Unruly bodies
Maddy’s advice
Bad girls throughout history
Thelma, homeless, underwear bras
Separation from women (reminds me of bell hooks & audre lorde)
Grace lee boggs
Living life without romance
Arundhati Roy.
Arundhati Roy. 

To do today: 
Eat healthier, run more
Upper body and yoga (serious)
Pushups
Write about a little life
Asanas pranayama meditation
Alternate nostril breathing
Journal habit
No coffee or huge dinners
Breast cancer & drinking
Routine
Make my own shampoo
Only shop secondhand
Journal on missing my essence
No phone after 9; dessert not daily
Prioritize health...yoga, healthy foods, good things for my body
No. coffee.
Ever. decaf.
Poem on loss
Night ritual
Coconut oil hair treatment, wash face with honey
Lemon teeth.
Don’t check phone in morn right away
Each day I commit to one thing 

“I”:
Anxiety is being an alien to yourself
The feeling that life is small
I’m with myself all day. 

To say to cuong:
Honey
No subject
Introvert
“I”
My recipe
Relationship 

Cuong’s answers: 
Gifts Gratitude.
Reconnect
No subject
Relationship unfulfilled 

Tender data:
About living a juicy creative life
Do uncertainty, but do happiness. That’s an order. ​



​


Dummies

Actually, the more I write, the more I read
The older i age
The less words make sense to me 

##

Oh, un-self-conscious reading
Never stopping
Once, twice, thrice
To get it 

##

It’s like language is becoming new to me
Or I’m becoming new to it
Fresh discovery sounds better than confusion 

##

There are some words I’ll bump into often
And still lack the social grace to converse with
Some words I am lost around
Aphorism, discourse, epistemology 

##

And this feels like a global process
In my life. 

##

Actually, everything feels new and threatened. 

##

It’s like I’ve torn out all the pages of the Dummy manuals
The ones with yellow covers
Cooking for dummies
English grammar for dummies
Small talk for dummies
Sex for dummies
In the corner of my eye, someone more practical than me folds the loose papers into origami desks and
chairs, sits down, and writes an essay. 

##

This newness
This unstripping
Is it a good thing?
Relationships for dummies
Being a daughter for dummies
A little bit of everything for dummies
The person has folded the papers into structures, into semi-permanent homes, and has solved
homelessness in the bay area. 

##

I stand, a dumb ostrich
In front of young faces
One is asking a simple question
Can I have a moment? 

##

These days, as I write
I approach the words like they are endangered animals
Full of awe, eaten by worry,
I nudge them together. 

##

​Is this right?
Does that mean something? 

##

The people who live in the semi-permanent homes read their walls, which tell them about the present
perfect, how to fry vegetables, and how often to call your mother. 
They laugh.

​

Ilse Griffin received her BA in English literature and creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her MA in TESOL/linguistics from Hamline University. She teaches English at home and abroad, and has been published in Where is the River, Funny Looking Dog Quarterly, Pif Magazine, Talking Stick (forthcoming), and Bending Genres Journal (forthcoming). She loves in St. Paul, Minnesota. 

Website: https://ilsehogangriffin.wixsite.com/mysite   ​

Mayastar CC




Spirit Danced When She Created Her Next Best Thing

—for children, and all, who are labeled odd, aloof, or different 


downpour-days ran barefoot 
through river of alleys
laughed / stomped
splashed childhood before her eyes
where youth echoed 
Etch A Sketch turns / shakes
Play-Doh shaped birds / mermaids
Slinky stretch-and-re-form-itself romp
down the upstairs steps
where pixie cut tossed 
on backyard swing / purple tricycle
peddled by girl anxious to create 
her next best thing 
in art / song / word 
as she fashioned her way 
into adulthood / applied her muse 
through years of downpour-days
where loss left her barely treading water 
yet / she remained buoyant / persevered
splashed creativity 
toward harsh winds / mild breezes
across the collective of climates 
that shape humanity
where spirit danced 
altered internal weather 
illuminated life 
when she created 
her next best thing





Working Titles of Poems That Became the Poem


Before He Died, Sage Offerings
Matthew 7:6
Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
Don’t Fall for It, a Cautionary Tale
Clearing Trauma, Gifts That Heal, Honor, and Soften Your Path
Woman in Restoration
Releasing Layers, Returning to the You in You
They Were All Seeds for Growing a Garden of Wisdom
It’s Raining Today and I’m Watching a Tapestry of Hands
Gone Missing in a Landscape of Pews
She Asked Me Where I Found My Peace
Walking in Meadows Near Ribbons of Light
When the House Is Quiet the Words Come
Write It Down
A Family of Voices
As Long as She Can Remember She Crossed State Lines
The Bridge That Crosses, the Sign That Welcomes
Internal Reckoning
An Artist Counts Her Teeth
Lotus Drank, Sipped from Waters Pooled in Devotion
Love, Praise, Forgive, Repeat

​
​

                    Alexander Rabb CC




​My Father as a Tiny Dragon


So how in hell did we end up with dragon? Fly ash and cold pit and the long slip down, 
the beast that summons then swallows the drooping, earth-gut town,
potatoes for breakfast and potatoes for supper and potatoes for lunch tomorrow,
a dragon’s dragon’s silica chest borrowing breath from a bottle of sorrow, 
inheritance less a continuous guzzle than an accretion of sags and troughs, 
the sorry mountainside giving in, heaving and wheezing, coughs; 
then a bird’s-eye view of oblivion from a ridge half-forgotten as heartbreak,
the body raked with incoming garbage: arsenic, lead, cadmium, chromium, iron, uranium, nickel,
hard little blue-gray assassins burrowed like fugitives under the skin, 
that thin line between the hurt-borne self and a purple-hearted projection,
a Tin Man’s chest full of nothing but pressure and wartime souvenirs; then years 
of fragile delusion, a performance of the American dream underwritten by Standard Oil 
with an excessively boozy intermission and a violent second act.
 “He had tremendous hatred for a lot of women,” my uncle interrupts, ad libbing.
“He didn’t have the nicest temperament, and neither did any of us. 
And from the sound of it, I don’t think you have a nice temperament, too.” 




Up here on the spot-lung mountaintop, the dragon inside the body caves in, 
bony beak haggles like a bellows for air, like a pocket that’s sighing for change. 
The coal tunnel throat gulps burnt and sour, the char in a barrel of blasted fish,
a wheezing canary’s final wish for wings in sunlight, like smack in a vein that’s collapsing
while gravity’s railroad takes its glum lumps from the childhood heaps at Carbondale 
to the childhood mules on the D&H Canal along 16 miles of hand-hammered tracks,
the stuttering slump of a dragon’s racked back, the blap-blap-blap fist in his war chest gunning 
against its cage; a family bound to gravity by rage, down and panting on the living room rug, 
a 4-year-old hugging her knees. Can’t we please bolt the door on the afterworld of love?
A bird will eat from a still hand, dragon; lie down in the brownfields, disarmed




Thunder! Dragon come home, dirty-knot dog at the front door panting at his loafered
heels, while the rest of us avoid him. Thunder! Dragon sits down, swallows the dining
room table and chairs. Thunder! Dragon gets up, melts into an infant condensation of
himself, lightning scorching each iris, the ultramarine garbage-patch, the slag dump
marring the shore. Thunder! His firebolt face the atmospheric equivalent of a magazine
loader; the rest of us cower instinctively, a home-grown version of the hard lockdown
drill. Thunder! Dragon ka-booms, nine cracked tongues bang out of his body, a
crowding that sounds like an air raid siren, shattering glass in the high-rise condos,
storm petrels sobbing and blown off course, whirlwinds and sandstorms and lion-faced
eagles tearing small herds of antelopes to shreds. Thunder! Dragon swoops in from the
south, swerves in from the north, comes barreling in from the west and the east.
Thunder! Dragon grows horns, racing up out of his temples and careening around his
head. Thunder moon, hay moon, buck moon, blood moon, kicking the living daylights
out of the small herd of antelopes knit together behind the living room couch. Thunder!
Dragon grabs hold, hoarfrost and hot squall and mile-long tornado. Thunder! Dragon
bites down, a disaster that stretches backward and rattles molecular chains, small herd
of antelopes morphs into a pack of banes in a stunted grove struggling to break the spell




How human the problem of tending a fire, building my ugly pile of sticks
while the finches eat fat in the rain. Even as you melt, tiny dragon, 
your weight could pull this birdhouse apart, unchecked baggage a hungry ghost’s art, 
the part in the tale where the roof is blown clear off the pig. 
I’ve propped it up on pins and needles, splinted the thing like a broken bone, spat wishes at it 
as if it weren’t wooden, called it music, called it language, called it home. There is nothing 
that makes this nursery rhyme last but the oink-oink-oink of my hammer-hoof wrath 
at the blacks of your keyboard spine. It’s a conundrum done up in DNA lacing,
this face that’s facing the mirror on the wall. I see you, dragon, owling back at me, 
unspooling your drunkard fairytales, the damnedest of them all





You don’t guard a flaming pearl, tiny dragon, you don’t guard a golden fleece,
you’re not the kind of dragon for sword fights and safekeep; with your thirst like a camel, 
your hunger like hogs, you land in a smog of disasters and cut the clouds full fast 
but I have gorged, tiny dragon, on the pillage you’ve amassed, some of it rotten, some of it sweet,
your drunk eyes as red as winter’s stored apples, your drunk eyes as red as summer’s raw meat,
you fucked with the weather, turned off the moon, tattooed your image on my back with your teeth,
and always I feel followed. In these duck-blind poems I hide inside, loaded and pointed and cocked,
what’s to stop me from going ballistic? There is nothing to cease the lockjaw grinding, 
send the monkey packing in his combustible pillbox hat; I’ve been hacking up fire, 
hot and cold and dry and wet, a net of sweat and cluster bombs, since the universe was in diapers, and
still, I could forget every open-sesame, every secret word to herd the  turbulent, flesh-eating bird off of
my chest where it shits on my thoughts and devours the rest of the chorus, 
a burn like the runaway greenhouse effect that turned Venus to porous junk,
a lump of boiling porridge even Goldilocks would reject. Where, in such appetite, can grace be met?
Let’s direct the story toward the bears’ grief in finding their sense of place made brief
by human business. Sadness is their witness. The sadness of a map of the world as big as the world and
equally torn. We are born to such a chart as this; I can GPS my birth in its tatters, 
and all that matters is to find a route through each angry shred, to see sadness ahead 
in the middle of the lane, a ball of hunger, ticks, and mange, and to stop there 
and quietly watch while it passes. Tiny dragon, how staggering it feels, 
my engine idle, breathing for real, world come alive in your ashes


 
 
The hardball of the car alarm ricochets off the city walls, and cracks the teensy teacup ear 
of the swallow, who, chirping, stops chirping to compose a considered response, while we wallow
in our caution-tape wherefores, oblivious to the exchange. Rough beasts, you and I,
lumps of clay erupting, tiny volcanoes melting the streetscape as we hurry along on our
wham-bam way. Here is the trigger and here is the blast, here is the hunk of metal
in the fleshed-over wound, a “fuck” in your head, fuzz on the tongue, your pupils differential, 
an emergency interruption in the otherwise bland and businesslike day, 
like the whole damned world missed the sound check, dragon, and now 
your ears are filled with blood, muffling the ice breakers’ clanging upriver 
and the fog horn’s oh-no-no-no-no. What do dragons suggest? 
Bad weather and plenty of it, rain come down like bullets, and bullets come down like rain. 
Dragon, your claws are made of blown glass; when you dance us across the living room rug wearing
us on your feet, the weight of family shatters them and scatters them like shrapnel.
With the living room rug as my witness, and the swallow that’s socked by our hullabaloo,
and the pink flamingo as witness, too—a father of eight, a survivor of floods, who lay in the mud
of a Balkan zoo while boys barely ready for two-plus-two kicked him until he was finished—I pray 
a dragon’s wings, hard as rusks, soften in the milky dusk and melt themselves into an updraft.
May your talons, in glassy glitter and shards, constellating like hot little stars, strafe the night 
with their razzamatazz, pulse like beacons from a billion-mile distance, and everyone feel safe

​