by Lael Ewy
Snow is our punishment
for the amnesia of summer.
The mind is saddled
with memory—all the better
for our reverences to ride, but burdened,
still, with the baggage of having been,
seeming safe beneath the pines, a swollen,
slumped soldier, frozen to his mount:
the ark of Adam, the idiocy
of a child. To imagine is to project
one’s warm body back
into a bank of snow and expect
warming universal fact.
We live in a snow-cave
and dream its walls,
smoothed by our breathing, closed
against the Elements, its silence
the deafness of the gods.
by E.W. Wilder
1.
She is not the sort of woman for whom one buys flowers;
she is the sort for whom one builds gardens.
The pout, pursed into bow, the serpentine
arms, the hands poised as if
in the middle of a thought. Through almost thought
those hands make the table they lay on. The vase,
the spoon.
2.
A curl of fennel glides to those lips: commas, side-by-side,
impromptu descriptors of thus.
3.
Those lips once branded me,
the blood smudge of a smashed cherub.
4.
On the blood of dead cherubs she glowed.
5.
There is no reason
to dispute.
Consider the splinter,
this interjection
into the innocent
sky of skin, the wood
made flesh, if you will–
and its will a sorting
of revenge from the un-
toward anger of the plane
and saw.
–Lael Ewy
From the Cataclysm,
a girl named Pepper
emerges: a sausage from a cluster
of fey-grey petals. Drone-
bodied and doily-tatted,
she wooed
the Blue Blazer--
brass-buttons a-jingle--
into pale dismastment.
Beer-rings blossomed in the fog.
--EW Wilder