Avra Wing

In the ICU

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My sister has: diabetes, COVID, pneumonia, a staph infection.

She has been intubated, then sedated and paralyzed

so she doesn’t disturb

the wires and tubes attached to her.

She is behind the glass door,

and we—husband, children, sister—

are forbidden to go inside.

We can’t touch her.

And even though she wouldn’t know if we did,

we want to.

We peer in like new parents outside the hospital nursery

trying to identify which baby is ours.

Ah. There she is, swaddled in her burn blanket,

lying prone to ease her breath.

Or, if not the proud parents, we are the proverbial kids,

noses pressed against the window of the candy shop.

My sister the sweet treat we cannot afford.

2

Deciding she should die opened doors—

the glass doors of the ICU keeping us from her.

Another doctor came to reassure we made the right choice.

The rabbi bestowed a spiritual stamp of approval.

We signed releases,

suited up in green polypropylene gowns,

purple nitrile gloves, our very best masks.

We knew the risks of going in,

but not the risk of seeing her like that.

Skin swollen, her beautiful hands puffed up.

Lips parched, eyes ointmented shut.

Face red and peeling as if she’d been out in the sun,

but in that place there was little light.

The monitors were silenced,

the slimy alien horror of breathing tube

extracted from deep in her throat.

She took one, two, three breaths.

None of us looked at each other,

inadequate to the moment.

We waited til the doctor came in

to search for no heartbeat,

then marched slowly out as mourners,

tearing off the gowns as if rending our garments.

The gloves came away with them.

I thought—how efficient.

Years before at the pet hospital putting down the cat

it occurred to me that this was preparation,

a rehearsal just in case.

The cat had stopped eating, drinking,

Hid under a chair. Was not itself.

Sometimes death is the right decision.

Sometimes you have to live with that.

Tsankawi

We take the trail carved in volcanic tuff,

climbing toward the site

of an ancient pueblo

until we’re blocked by rocks,

the rubble of ruined homes,

and I can’t make it past.

The others go on.

I sit on a boulder, wait

among the Jemez Mountains,

the Sangre de Cristo.

Juniper pines scent the air.

The only sound the droning of a bee.

The sun picks out each fleck of mica

sparkling in the stones.

I am alone.

I am the only person in the world.

No one is coming back for me

because there is no one else.

The Anasazi lived here long ago,

but now there are no people.

Such a word doesn’t exist.

I am not human. I do not breathe.

Not dead, but alive only

as the things that live here.

The mesa welcomes me as one of its own.

I am rock, bee, sun, sand, saltbrush, tree.

I have been here forever.

I am the stillness.

And the earth stops turning.

Hot 100

That summer, and for all those summers, we gathered each night

outside our apartment houses, leaned against cars and each other.

We wore short shorts, cut offs, headbands, fading madras, Keds.

It was hot those nights. The air smelled of sweat and dog shit steamed in the sun.

Still, we wanted touch, to entwine ourselves. What we wanted we couldn’t quite name—

thought it was boyfriend, girlfriend, kiss, holding hands, arm around the waist,

having someone, being chosen. I Wanna Love Him So Bad

We were 13, then 14, 15, 16, our homes chock-a-block on Rochambeau,

DeKalb, Gun Hill Road—and never thought of the war their names came from.

Our parents knew each other. They were first or second generation,

they sat together on beach chairs in the vacant lot. We heard their murmurs and laughter,

saw the red glow of the tips of their cigarettes in the dark. We were safe.

They thought they knew us. Where we were. They wanted us to be educated,

we who knew only one thing about the world—that each other lived there.

Sandy, Sonia, Annette, Joan, Norm, Phil, Peter, Lee. The gang.

We knew nothing about the war (Lee would be drafted.) Soldier Boy

We stayed for hours. What could we have talked about, so ignorant?

Didn’t even know who we were except when we were together, merged.

How could I think I was ever alone? Those summers I was eight other people.

I have the black and white Kodaks to prove it, their scalloped edges.

We ceased to exist when we went inside at 9,

reanimated like sea monkeys in the morning in each other’s company.

We were silly, jealous, devoted, chose randomly, went from one to the other, the radio

playing in our heads—it was all broken-hearted love, thrilling love,

desperate love. The pain of it. It was what we lived for. I Can’t Help Myself

We had no parents, no history, no home except one another.

The songs led us astray, but we kept following.

---

Avra Wing’s poetry appeared most recently in Constellations, The American Journal of Poetry, The Hollins Critic, and Cimarron Review, and is upcoming in I-70 Review. She is the author of two novels, Angie, I Says, a New York Times “notable book” made into the movie “Angie, and After Isaac for young adults. Avra leads a NY Writers Coalition workshop at the Center for Independence of the Disabled, New York. She can be found at www.avrawing.com

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Oz Hardwick

The Reassuring Otherness of Ritual Roleplay

On Founders’ Day we dress as dogs, squeezing into the old spots and patches, buckling on the studded collars, and tagging ourselves in case we get lost. I’ve been here more than twenty years and remember the old days, with the boisterous yapping and a little bit of nipping at throats. It was all fields then and you could chase rabbits until your breath sang like a high-pitched whistle and your head spun like cartoon bluebirds. My coat was gold and jet and fit like my true self; my teeth were a case of knives to carve up the world before I swallowed it raw. I’m proud to say the fur still fits, though it’s threadbare in patches and worn at the joints; and though the zip bust way back when, a few pins and you can’t see the join. No one ever told me why we do it, but we’ve corridors full of photos of employees sat at heel, their eyes bright and tongues lolling. And though these days I just lie by the fire in a dream of speed and green pastures, it’s still the best day of the year. Tomorrow I’ll dress as a human and sip a tall latte macchiato, but today I’ll lick water from a low bowl and take a bite out of anyone who comes too close.

Flock

Last night I left the door ajar, and now the house is full of songbirds. I barely know a coal tit from a chaffinch, but taxonomy’s merely a short step to taxidermy and today’s all about life. A tiny lad the colour of burnt syrup hops beneath the sofa, while a red-breasted girl with a black mask dances with a blue-cloaked dandy on the glass-topped table, and speckles and stripes chatter and dash from chairs to shelves, to picture rails. All hail the beak and feather! When the cat’s away the mice may play, but when the cat’s asleep the birds will cheep, as my birdlike auntie used to say as she pecked seeds from a willow pattern plate. What songs resound from lamp and cornice! Feel how those windows shimmy and shake! I’d love to share their trill and flutter, but my tongue is tuned to the roots of the earth, an early worm still blissfully asleep.

My New Favourite Museum

Smell Project Offers Scents of History

– Metro, 18 November 2020, p. 6

In the digital museum of lost scents, they have synthesised fish baking on the Galilee shore, Pepys’s parmesan melting beneath the burning city, sweat and metal polish on the raised Jules Rimet cup, and Titus Oates’ breath mixed with nothing but ice and sky. These are the ones that bring in the punters; the ones on which school children write misspelled essays—Oats, Rime, Peeps, and how many ls are there in Gallillee? —and the ones casual visitors buy en masse on keyrings, T-shirts, and virtual postcards for friends and family. My interests are more niche, and I always find myself at the blood drying on Van Gogh’s left shoulder, or Lizzie Siddal’s cold bathwater with its base notes of oil and dying flowers. There’s a lesson to be learned about art here; a lesson to be learned about devotion, and I’ve filled a dozen or more A5 pads with reactions and reminiscences, their margins crammed with olfactory equations and sketched grotesques in the medieval mode, their noses poking at key revelations. Come: press Enter. It’s best if you close your eyes. Scratch the screen with the last coin in your pocket, then lean in close. Breathe.

---

Oz Hardwick is a European poet, who has published “about a dozen” full collections and chapbooks, including Learning to Have Lost (IPSI, 2018) which won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry, and, most recently, A Census of Preconceptions (SurVision Books, 2022). He has held residencies in the UK, Europe, the US, and Australia, and has performed internationally at major festivals and in sparsely populated back rooms. Oz is professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University.

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Kevin Clark

As Ever

No matter where I’d be, you found a way in.

I dropped a tab as I drove, then waited

for the last scrim to fall away, the freefall

sky in twilit purples. By the time I pulled

into the back lot of The Drinkery Inn, wordless

conjecture readied itself on the neural edge.

First, you played it quiet as an empty bottle.

My father dead two decades, he’d have thought me

nuts, risking my last atoms of sense on acid

laced with strychnine to blare the colors.

Was this the road to wisdom beyond the brink—

or the spendthrift’s atomizing of time?

Then, you cautioned against caution, declared

we’re all born with a gyro itching toward tilt.

I leaned, then leapt

headlong. The door opened

to a sea of spectral cries, each laugh the color

of a throat. Across the room, Heckles and Walsh

waived me over, poured a long blonde bible

into steins. Were you my hold on the handle,

the lift of my arm? I drained mine quick before

Ralph coaxed me out back to drag his weed.

I’d have loved to speak as if I’d had any idea

worth the rising moment, but my sight flared

into a spun kaleidoscope, loud laughs

as compass drawing me back toward the guys

when I cut right for the head. Up there

over the urinal the compass whirled

as handless clock, timeless divulger

of the next clue spoken in ur-lingo. Done

or not, I shook and zipped, then looked up:

In a trip’s instant,

a face smiled back at me.

Had you always been there, sirenic green light

goading Now! before each choice was a Go?

A promise in the temporal lobe?

But promising

what? I asked the mirror as if it thought

my query genuine, but my face made it clear

I had to get home. I tried to translate

your last message to my wife before sleep.

The ground beneath us only seems solid,

you answered for her, and you again hissing

low, how every hunch is a happy accident.

We all know there’s nothing of consequence

in the rearview, you rasped in a whisper

of practiced indifference. There’s no clock,

you said, and the moon doesn’t talk. Please

eat your pillow, it’s so good, you smiled.

Once more, I said, as ever, you can leave now—

Hardball Apocalypse

–1979

When I was here, I wanted to be there.

–Captain Willard, Apocalypse Now

Can you picture what will be?

–"This Is the End,” The Doors

Stems and seeds slow-cooked in butter,

brownies moist as sponge cake sugared

with ash, we’d taken as much as we could,

ever ascendant, knowing better than the coleus

and spider plants hanging from gold hooks

in the apartment how we’d cross over

into the kind of edgeless dimensionality

our dreams aspire to, a vanguard belief

that required more inner magnitude

than we had, so in fear and panic I leapt

from the bed. Did I have the heart to swear

off dope next morning, the white

crosses, the mushrooms, the Blink

of acid on the little pink tabs?

—Hell

if an infinite cobra hadn’t aerosoled

through the screen window to the foot

of my mattress, its split-tongue growling

for years that night before I ground large

stone breaths of fear into grains

of riven sleep, an old girlfriend insensate

under the anvil of quaaludes she downed

to kill the bad buzz. For a year I fled

in full pursuit of the kind of lasting

dreamlessness we mistook for safety

in those days, all that blank dark so much

better than the venomous untethering

of our minds, until a hand shoved lemon tea

at me, and Ralph’s face insisted we cross

to the city, saying Fuck. The. Nightmares.

Fuck. The. Violence. You of all people know:

Art is its own reason. Why won’t you

see this film?

—And how to answer

but climb down into the tin armor

of my gutting-through till we shuffled out

under the marquee, concentric rows

of white and red bulbs in their manic circuit,

“This Is the End” stalking us streetward

when the hard dystopian light of afternoon

peeled off a white F-150, its custom foil

jacked high as a memory flagging me

from the deep.

At the famed fern bar

on Franklin, I pressed my inner eyes

at Ralph, heard myself telling him

about the portal some guys bore through,

as if there’s gold or God on the other side,

just think about Kurtz or Ahab, what

they’d been after, how the needle-tip

of their neuro-axes lost plumb, I begged,

how they’d no choice but to reverse poles.

Ralph resisted my theory, asked why

I’m always hiding myself from the reveal?

What gives?

Listen, I tell him, I can’t

even brake the story of my cousin Blink

who thought he’d found his way to blissing

into a quantum sub-field, the hideaway respite

of his paradisal needs, his ex-wife long into

the jet stream, the old X-15 engine he snuck

out of Holloman AFB in his quicksilver

pickup Hardball, then in the sparklight

of the old warehouse fused to the bed

of the pickup, his big slicks soldered

to wheels greased by proprietary SynLube,

illimitable horses primed with high-test

peroxide.

—And by God, I’m clamping

Ralph’s heart with each sentence, how

Blink headed out to the edge of the valley

on 70 that blue-blare day, gas pedal melting

on the floorboard, the GMC all gained-out

at 95, when he hit the jerried-switch as if

it was an oxy boost, how just then

his lungs sucked past breathless, his neck

near shred, cheeks caved, eyeballs caged,

the back of his head slabbed hard against

the headrest at 3Gs. This is the end,

beautiful friend, I said to the holograph

Ralph had become. Rubber stops where

the tires ascend. They’re still harvesting

slivers of Hardball off Sierra Blanca,

Blink a rumor in the jet stream. The story’s

too filled with mine

—that’s why, Ralph.

I’m like Blink, seconds before he marries

the peak. Don’t you hear Hardball call

from the air grave? Listen, velocity loves

terminus. It’s every day, my foot’s pushing

every pedal to the floor. It’s not to die,

but the moment before. Ralph nodded

the waiter to the table, took the check,

left cash, said, Let’s go, his mum face

off an ancient gallery. As we crossed

the Bridge, I tried to stare ahead while

the bay leapt up for us at terminal velocity—

---

Kevin Clark’s third volume of poems,The Consecrations, is published by Stephen F. Austin University Press. His second book, Self-Portrait with Expletives, won the Pleiades Press prize. His first collection, In the Evening of No Warning, earned a grant from the Academy of American Poets. His poetry appears in The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast, and Crazyhorse. A former critic for The Georgia Review, he’s published essays in The Southern Review, Papers on Language and Literature, and Contemporary Literary Criticism. He teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop. His website is: http://kevinclarkpoetry.com.

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