mimesis

Julie Carter

Steep

The hillside shrugs its death beneath my heel
and crumbles, loam and root, cascading down
like bitter water. Maple saplings wheel
just out of reach. Within the tumbling brown
we strike the creekbed, splash into the cold
and lie there buried by each fallen thing
that chased us down—the trees, the littered mold
of leaf decay, a pair of leather wings
that used to flank a bat. We are alone,
I with the corpses of old memories,
and you, now corpseless, ashed right out of bone
and bound so meager, packaged like a tea
in tin. This is the water boiled to steam.
I brew you in the darkness of the stream.

 

Rob Mackenzie

Plastic Cork

Some things don’t belong together, like ‘plastic’
and ‘cork’; or you, me and a long evening in
after the informal split, with the lamb joint
still bloody in the oven and the stars
smudging the haar outside the window
like milk-spills in a gutter.

Before we know it, the long gap between ‘semi’
and ‘naked’ is being bridged
and meaningless acts are taking place
beneath the table. Afterwards you switch the TV off -
a documentary on tourism you’d watched
with half an eye. You take your coat,
walk into the fog, as if ‘something’
and ‘nothing’ were all part of the same thing.

 

Emily Stuart

Good Weather for Fishing

He thinks it is good weather for fishing.
The second woman
with old hair and powder made from crushed seashells
sips swamp water from the mouth of the man with a flat Crow nose
....................and he culls her hair with hands, not his alone,
....................turning her neck into a cornstalk leaning,
....................whispering “Bia, Bia”.

He tells the other one, in stockings rolled to her ankles,
that the Whip-poor-will was out last night halving babies
from moonstones, into the dirt they come from.
....................And yes, he saw the fox swallowing
....................up the road with scatterpaws,
....................a fishing rod tucked behind his terracotta fur.
A tick to tell time by; that water must be teaming.

The second woman hangs her body in the air
long enough to say “I never trust a man whose mama
didn’t teach him the piano.”

And what kind of fool, with the pockmark face,
lopes in a room beneath the kitchen floor
building trains no man can sit in,
building engines to run on light bulbs.
His fingers, like sewing needles, thread clay mountains
with floss grass and black glass beads meant for coal.
....................He’ll collect himself a world with his mouth as the sun
....................and pin bait minnows to streams of blue paint.