Ouroboros

Gretchen Rockwell, Issue 05

The first time I saw the sharp silhouettes

I couldn’t fumble fast enough to capture

a photograph: Indian flying foxes, bats remembered 

from a Weird n’ Wild Creatures card collected

at ten, when I thought I wanted to be a biologist 

before I realized I'd have to do science. Then I traded

that flying fox card for a Cerberus one, caring more 

about the spiderweb of wonder between literary 

and literal. These days I prefer nature in its un-

nerving wonders. Who needs Athena splitting Zeus' skull 

when mind-controlling jewel wasps exist, spiking into 

lesser insects and hijacking them as a host for their spawn

which eat the corpse inside out and emerge fully formed? 

I still have a favorite fantastical creature: the phoenix, whose nature

is self-immolation. In reality, the mechanism is rarely so static as fire, 

instead often a living instrument, nature curling in on itself 

in an endless wheel. The shadow of death takes the shape of wings

or fangs or the leafy fronds of a fern, unfurling. The lesson is: 

nature will kill you eventually, from the inside out 

or as another of its incarnations. Still, I prefer its marvels 

over myth—how certain seeds can only bloom after being 

burned, flowers exhaling open after forest fires, ash  

still hanging thick in the air while something 

new pokes through: life wriggling out through the cracks.

Only Treading

Hal Y. Zhang, Issue 05

Here amidst the Pacific
I have forgotten dryness.
The Saharan memory chants
no longer work—
yellow an abstract color, what some
once called my skin but
my webbed hands
breaking and rebreaking the skin of water
are not any color but
water. Dry perhaps is
the sensation of tickling, a bug burrowed
within, that deep in the throat
I knew but has left me.
Shriveled needles, concentrating sun
power into singular points, how
does a cactus live with being
unwanted
among the ferns, how
we float
just to live now, the water
is not life but illusion
thereof. They say you will
see things but I
never have, only sky
and sky
and sky
the largest hole
I can’t fall into.
The one constant still
mutable, blue to black
to bleeding dawn, not like
the sea a faceless mirror. Look down:
there is only yourself,
broken,
phantom arcs that don’t define you
stories you don’t believe
splayed against your palm.
It will take lifetimes to read
moving parts
to memories
to through,
but all you
have is
time.

Understanding Dorothy

E. Jade Lomax, Issue 05

I drove through the sunrise this morning.
It’s funny, how we don’t notice things like that.
You’re breathing. Your fingers are aching cold.
Then you look up, and the whole sky is
shot through with strands of light.
The world is in color again.
It always was.
Keep driving. Your fingers are freezing
but your chest is tight under two jackets
and a scarf your best friend crocheted for you.
The sunrise will come. Grip
the steering wheel. Watch
for merging traffic. Breathe.
On dark nights, carry a flashlight
and learn to tell green leaves from brown ones by touch.
I promise,

the world is in color.

I miss the birds in winter

E.M. Anderson, Issue 05

not the way you miss
a name on a gravestone
with an ache in your breast

but the way you miss your mother
when you live states apart:
it’s when you see her at Christmas and say
I missed you
that you know it’s true.

I don’t realize until spring
when they return—
      the red-winged blackbirds
the chicory in the ditches
      the buds on the lilac bush
      beside my garage
it’s the way I missed
      all the splintered pieces of myself
when I wore a wedding band.

I chinked the gaps in
with mud and slush and snow,
daubed over everything
       with fir trees
and colored lights
and train rides to Virginia

you don’t realize things are missing
you don’t know the earth is sleeping

until
      the first blackbird
wakes you up
      and trills his first spring song.