14.1 / SPRING / SUMMER 2019

_________ Joel Salcido was born in the San Fernando Valley & raised in West Phoenix. He is the son of Mexican immigrants, a first-generation college graduate, a husband, & father of three sons. Joel characterizes his work as hood magical realism—a navigation between the grief & ecstasy of place & experience.

_________ Sean DesVignes received his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from New York University. An NY-Emmy Award Winner, his poetry has won the Beinecke Scholarship and the Burton A. Goldberg Poetry Prize. He holds fellowships at Cave Canem, Callaloo, the Conversation, and Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital.

_________   Kathleen Flenniken is the author of two poetry collections, Famous (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), named a Notable Book by the American Library Association, and Plume (University of Washington Press, 2012), a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award and winner of a Washington State Book Award.

Lips He used to try to kiss me so my eyes closed, but they just closed shut like a baby doll’s—almost all the way. (Not quite.) We didn’t touch in summer — my skin cells usually soaked up too much pollen. Everything around us tasted like dirt— even the air. Especially tongues.

1. Dear mother, I arrived at the airport last night. Budapest is sinfully hot but I’ve found the most marvelous coffee shop close to Gabriel’s statue. He stabs the clouds and rains proclamations on pedestrians. I’m grateful for the precipitation, imaginary or not. Say hello to Kitty for me. I miss you both.

I misled him by seeming to be interested. From the doctor’s chair all the buildings that I once saw are gone. Bulldozers are preparing the ground for new growth as acid rubs into my nose with a Q-tip. He complains about the noise. They’re redeveloping again.

I had first heard of the storm in the office break room. It was a gray slab which housed coffee and old yogurts. I was adding another ring stain to the counter when I heard a discussion of Puerto-Rican debt. Cable news was always on.

>> THE_MOMENT_YOU_BECAME_SELF_AWARE.trau   There is a baby swaddled in blue cotton gurgling flat on its back with hands groping the air. A girl, Sister, enters frame right, creaking the crib as she leans over to examine the newborn. The baby stops.

after Simone West   you could be on stage the way you belt it out      flute-like I understand      the quietly guarded note homeless bird someone will eventually catch you and let you go in the name of letting you go how clean you are now your feather is no feather-duster many times I immersed myself     

Day of the Dead It was a long night, a billowing parade.

hung from the roof, mistaken for a flag when the light bends   like a rose bud / snuck / on the olive tree I make of his mouth / a fragrant limb he makes of my hips / a fertile ground and we drip oil / so a neighbor’s cigarette / could put us

I. Must burn them out through the atmosphere but must have a luminous stroke like a branch growing out straight from Chinese paper on the edge, a bird and dots of apricot.

Step one: Andromeda. Step two: dark eyelashes. Step three: adulthood with faint traces of childhood. Stabilizer: On. Auto-focus: off. Step four: love how she touches you. Think: the stars are planning the erasure of two-hundred-year-old silences, so let her try to reach you. Step five: look at her without expressing fear.

Dedicated to Kilolo Luckett   “Discomfort is always a necessary part of enlightenment.”—Pearl Cleage   Exhibit A: Rodin’s Fallen Caryatid   Her body: slick like    /           is stone, a twisted permanence. She could be unfurling upward, a whipping ribbon ready to cast this square rock off of the blade of her shoulder. But truth.

In the days following, when we are trying to understand three words, when our lives, as we knew them to be, were robbed from us by the thief dressed in borrowed robes, are the start of the early days.

“Gardening at Night” …occurs as result of the interruption of rem, which is remnant (of what little language endures: mothers sisters trees), and thus also revenant (risen then roosting, cocklike), and thus also covenant (which I have signed none of / nosebleeds onto freshman copy of Doctor Faustus does not figure) or perhaps you are

Another trip around the sun & somebody gets you an ice cream cake. I should think about learning to drive so I can go get one from Holy Cow myself, or really, so I can be the one-trick-pony in our no- horse-town.

He is sedated, cuffed, strapped to a gurney. Thirty-six hours of madness, some smashed glass and a busted radiator. I called an ambulance. He’s larger than this city, and so they treat him like a pitt fresh from a fight. I stay home.

Glance #1 If looks could kill, goes the expression, and in fact they can and do. To glance means to glide off a struck thing, to strike obliquely. We are talking about weapons now: to dart, to shoot, and about light: a blinding shine.

They came to the north country for gold but left with their hands full of copper.

[from feral girl] touch from that woman’s head a haze stretches so bunchy I feel bunchy my claw-filigreed skin where anything might want to touch at once its whole body the bright latches on her trunk turn to me is this sideways-am-I-moving or ago I-am remembering talk, it may be the am at her finger

I entered this city     emeralds on my fingers your voice as my throating. A spire slips into the ocean & an orca mother carries dead infants: five days     five days     five days I hear. You’re much too young     you lisp through me construction sight     a browner bourbon     a lusher performance velvet from 1965.

Ayeh watched the two boys cross the playground hard top from the far corner where the younger kids she didn’t know usually played. They seemed to look straight at her as they walked, but they were probably headed to the check-out stand where you could borrow a ball during recess or to the boys’ bathroom.

All morning I saw the osprey shadow move across the groundcover beneath me as I raked out the overgrowth: Faded plastic wrappers, a deflated ball and what else… Nubs of green. Something was happening for the osprey Maybe the fledglings were off.

Self-Portrait as Revision                      I am the storm-torn palm frond draped on the balcony wall. I am the cumin in the soup stirring the lentil’s sleep. I am the olive’s skeletal pit, the cat’s paw, the thistle spear. The clay in the kiln cast into a small flask to hold centuries of musk.

Brian sits me down. The kids are asleep—Emma, seven; Jack, three—and Brian sits me on the couch, takes the gray armchair. I sit back. I’m tired. He leans forward, over his knees. He’s also tired. First thing he said when he got home: “I’m tired.

Behind my house, wetlands are filled with dead and blowdown trees. Peepers signal spring and skunk cabbage carpets the muck, so thick and succulent I think I can eat it in the meatiest caesar salad. We wonder if we should fill in our pocket swamp, to make it productive.

As I awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, I found myself transformed in my bed into Franz Kafka.