The night has used itself up, the river, unbound, turns away

and the highway turns to disquiet, trucks downshifting

the overpass, engine upon engine of early morning,

diesel thick as wool and all that peaceful asphalt

sympathetic through the horizon. Not exactly peaceful,

just there, a vessel uniform and open, free from

any other purpose, curled by the office buildings,

yellow windows still lit with no memory, no guilt.

There is someone up there throughout the nights,

holding up the sky. Here the years, here the wind,

here the spotlight on the strip club’s roof

circling the clouds. The year before I die

I shall send out four hymns to track down God.

There will be no answer. Am I wrong to mention God?

No one can tell the living from the bones of the dead,

which is an example of faith, which is morning.

The highway does not subtract, it adds something,

luminous text of reflective paint makes the city whole,

a new dead voice, bridges stained green to match the eels

in the mud, the girders do not know whether to flourish

or rust, a form of groveling. Passenger, this will hurt a little.

There will be ruin, sedative of fog on the bottomlands

where the plow-horses desired not to be touched

in their centuried beds. Before the highway,

there were houses and the deaths of houses,

goldenrod in the slave cemetery, all plowed

under with the city watching. Before that,

something else, trespass and mandate,

osprey at the throat, I listen for it.

The decoy owl on the Masonic Lodge roof

does not scare the pigeons away, so I listen for it.

The pigeons, having never seen a fake owl, listen close

for any sound, sleeping or violence like the bluest eye

of seed rising up. This is why they are born.

Don’t hold it against me. To damage takes lessons

in vanishing, and here I am, steeled against death,

no sleep in days, I’m not going anywhere.

There is nothing I won’t do to live this life.

One day I’ll need to know why.





















from What Falls Down
Mia Nussbaum
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When I moved into the peapod room — large enough for a single bed and standing space beside it — the room’s other feature, a window, was open. The peapod room was in a row house, so my window looked out on another window, plus brick with intimations of sky. This was in the year radiators clanged O love, O love, or some of us heard them so; the year microwaves in our building shorted in storms; my landlord sent away for crystal animal figurines and confided in strangers about his medically-enforced celibacy; my brother bought me movie tickets from a remove of several states; and our nation began bombing the Land of Abraham in earnest. I couldn’t sleep. This was the year that, sleeping at a friend’s in an effort to sleep, I woke in panic, walked to a Ukrainian diner in the dark and ate pancakes that were heavy and light in the manner of dancers. Shortly thereafter S. assigned me a point on the Enneagram. Shortly thereafter, breaking up a fight at the girls’ school, I shouted breaking-up-fight clichés, like “There’s nothing to see here!” and “Get back to class!” Of course there was something to see, which is part of why war is the health of the state. Getting back to class, I recalled a day in eighth grade when our whole junior high was supposed to be outside, Earth Day, it must’ve been, picking up trash — pop can weed pipes, chip bags — and upstairs B., from track team, was jumped by six or seven girls, one of whom, after they’d taken B.’s bloody face and ran it up and down the burning, popping bathroom radiator, after they’d pressed it into that radiator, revealing pus and blistered striations where once eyebrows, cheeks, lips, freaked out, turned coat, and ran outside to tell our hall monitor that B. was kicked and cut and nearly dead. When the ambulance arrived, we all felt that there was something to see.

from The Pool
Mary Hickman
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Woke to the smell of apples like an open nerve, the scent a memory
pushed from sleep.

I have no and every reason to think you know and have closed
a devil into you. Holed gem
allowed as under-lung, all lining, that you’d spread
a praying fan on me.

What is wise could not repent in breath. In breath, repeats—
a ship,
curled groove that could this time end in sea.

do foot-print sounds of snow

know that you

are a Woman? Goose

in the air, not a reflection

of loose

self,

because without touch (tho

my finger points to it, follows, traces, it

across) no

witness, yet you read?