mimesis

Arlene Ang

Cordon Bleu

Their mother called every night cordon bleu.
She drank. For as long as seven days, she managed
to hold down a job washing dishes, like nausea.
The Catholic nuns educated her well. They taught her
Agnus Dei—which means things could be worse.
Like an orphanage. She reads the newspaper
every day. She listens to the radio from upstairs.
What is the upper class, she wants to know, if not
sleeping on the top bunk? She lets her children
steal what they can from the world. She locks herself
in a one-room flat. They enter like cats, bringing in
slaughter. Her hand wrinkles their hair. She lets them
take their turns on the bunk bed. When she passes
out, the green parquet freezes her cheek for a kiss.

 

Alistair Noon

Spacewalking

When spines hit concrete, movement doesn’t cease:
the fingers of the audience deflect
each others’ eyes to windows they suspect
have opened onto airy stairs. Police
lazily scrub the street’s red grease
with broom and tree-bed earth. Medics detect
no beat, no breath, no beat again, have checked
this tired mid-summer has revoked its lease.

Moonrise by day. This astronaut avoids
the ambulance’s urgent trolley but
will take the grey van’s slow, veiled bunk. The throb
of veins now in official polaroids.
Ignition. No siren. The door slots shut.
A dog trots off with a glove in its gob.

 

Carolyn Srygley-Moore

Instances of the Glimpsed Sublime

We couldn’t hide in the terracotta noise of river rushing over the rocks.
Our hands, shaking, were the hands of sorcerers fearful of their own potions.
Imbuing us, the speed of imagination, at which we cadenced our love.
You will be a baglady, you said, an incantation. I threw dove song
back to the trees surrounding the clearing. Everybody has evidence
their god exists, to the exclusion of all others; our gods lightly fenced the wall between.
In the Deep South, it’s what you do not do: take a walk

.............through the starless abyss
.............of summer, the fireflies just out, glimmering like sandbox-panned fool’s gold,
.............wearing only a sheathe of nightclothes through which the wind
.............traces your ribs, a synthetic that illumines you
.............as if you are afire, falling from history’s windowless tower.

These are the war letters written on leaves, a crispness that memory shoplifts.
These are the ivy scars white as orchids trailing the wrist. The pit of the moon
is the pebble over which the green water rushes/or a cloud, perhaps.
These are the doors we possess, turning our face toward the forest, begging.
Come to me, let me taste you. It is conjured, my daughter’s
radical first-cry; it was Easter. My world, in an instant, had a blizzard lobotomy,
all the mad trains of urgency, they were carried away.