There’s currently new work
(a poem and some hybrid work)
in two Alaskan Journals.
Anchorage, home of Cirque
A poem from the manuscript
The Next World
is in the current issue of
Volume 13, No. 1
The poem centers around something that I’ve been trying to write about for decades and can’t seem to get quite right: Being swarmed by bees when I was five. I’ve written it as a short essay, I’ve written it as a prose-poem, but I always felt that something was missing.
Though I think there’s still something missing to this new attempt, it’s getting closer:
Bees, Faeries, Souls of the Dead, Maitake Mushrooms:
how the world was made
When I was five I was swarmed by bees; a blanket of bee bodies
covered my head, torso; bee bodies searched up my nose, circled
the roof of my mouth, spoke to each other inside my ears. I am
perpetually caught between the terror of anticipating a thousand
stings and relief from feeling such closeness, the weight of all
those bodies who had chosen me, chosen to touch me, cover me,
in a way that human beings, up to that time, had not. I still feel
the brush of wings and leg-tines against my skin on the edge
sleep….
The rest of the poem can be found
Art by Sage Cruser
The two hybrid works in
Issue 44.1,
are from the original manuscript of
Another Apocalypse.
The manuscript started out as a strange little prose-poem work, but over the last two years has morphed into something I can probably call “fiction.” Sure, let's call it fiction. There’s an actual story now and it looks very different from the original.
Another Apocalypse, Take 22
The new angels arrived yesterday. They arrived in clouds of phthalates-boiled dust. The old phone wires screamed their praise. Everything bowed down to the sound. I woke from a dream of bats circling flare-stacks on a vast plain, then kneeled beside the bed, whispered the secret and holy names of fear…
The rest of the original works can be found
here (Another Apocalypse, Take 22)
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