In Praise of Windmills

As a single bird fixed in motion pins the sky to itself
remorse grows freely along the wetlands where compromised waters
breed few and far between flowers of great beauty and the human brain
spews soft gray clouds cloudy with truth

I am that river that cleanses—
the invention of a self set apart in ignorance of its own choosing
to be the not music and the not poison
a fluid dynamic of ceaseless production forsaking the concerned landscape

and a bitter end

Regeneration

I saw you pluck a piece of sapling from the hills
A present, I don’t know,
A sun-scorched story,
A tale
A massive ambience of the liquid time.

But the manner you beheld it
Like you could see through its bare bones,
If you lick up the juice, now and then.

Forest Spirit

Many selves,
a raging fire, a sparkling chasm.
viper slithers to its apogee – the sun –
almost succeeds, almost destroys –
I am justified in brevity, breathing
as I, come face to face,
and so it is – angry souls in each other’s bodies –
while August burns treacherously
in the dry grasses.

Boy leaves tracks. Life trudges.
Brooding, endorsing the searing sun,
Can’t close the seed captured here,
die brother…live sister….
no distress or bitterness or revenge –
merely randomness that
divides itself unmercifully

First Light

First light through the curtains
I find myself simultaneously
four billion years old
and newly made as bread dough.
Pillowcase wrinkles
on my face are spacetime,
my bed aloft on cosmic riptides.
From here I can see every particle
entangled with every other particle.
From here, reality is infinity
expressed in intricate calculations.

Beyond Reach

Like the arc of an asteroid’s predicted landing
none of us are sure what’s yet to come as we ignore
skin’s craving. We stay in this strange apart space where
we cannot shake hands hug dance kiss cannot simply slide
next to one another on couch park bench diner booth as we’ve
always sat, loops for the same belt.

Instructions for My Proper Burial

Instructions for My Proper Burial When I die, don’t you dare put me in a box, And don’t you dare put me in a yard with other deadboxed. Don’t you dare. When I die, separate me into the humors. Sort me into my constructive pieces like the Egyptians did. Cut my feet at the ankles […]

The Friction Between Things

Wim Coleman is a playwright, poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer. His poetry has been published in SOL: English Writing in Mexico, The Opiate, Dissenting Voice, Tuck Magazine, and Vita Brevis. His play The Shackles of Liberty was the winner of the 2016 Southern Playwrights Competition. Novels that he has co-authored with his wife, Pat Perrin, include Anna’s World, […]

The Grey Champion

Nels Hanson grew up on a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California and has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart nominations in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. His poems received a 2014 Pushcart nomination, Sharkpack Review’s 2014 […]

June

JuneLather that Place below the navelFingers treading waterTime transcending timeShe trails the oceanDrags it behind her Moves through it like glassCutting continents in halfI floss myself with her bonesshe sinks into me like poisonTeeth grinding teeth into ash Niamh Burns is a 23 year old queer writer from Alberta, Canada. Through their love of written […]

Blackbird

Christine A. MacKenzie is currently a student of creative writing and psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a regular writer for Mentality Magazine and The Odyssey, as well as a Crisis Counselor and anatomical dissector research assistant. She has been published in Eunoia (March 2018), The Underground (April 2018), and Teen Ink […]

Visitant

Literary pilgrims welcome

time