literature

who are you fooling?

unmade bed in a dark room
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Don’t Think
–Elisa Gabbert

One way to fall asleep is paradoxical intention: trying not to fall asleep.

So the thinking goes, this reduces your performance anxiety.

The question is, who are you fooling, if you really want to fall asleep?

As if sleep were a performance for God.

The instructions on a sleep mask say, you still need to close your eyes.

I wish the pink light of sunrise lasted longer, the warm pink of in-between.

One way to fall asleep is to say Don’t think over and over to yourself.

The instructions say, try to practice it mindlessly.

In sleep, sleep becomes an everlasting interlude, an eternal in-between.

I read that staring into space “can help”—but can’t remember what it helps with,
thinking or not thinking.

Not thinking is the closest we can get to stopping time.

All I know of time is in my mind; my mind is all I know.

Only fifteen minutes ago, I had no idea it was going to snow.

And yesterday, and yesterday, what did we believe?

It’s so easy to forget, as if it were a dream.

The future wasn’t obvious.

And the old snow on the mountains that never would melt—it didn’t look real.

Photo by Quin Stevenson on Unsplash 

uses

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Uses
– Ama Asantewa Diaka
He used “I love you”
as compensation
for all the ways
he failed to love her
She used “I love you”
as an antidote
to pause the rot

 

museum of obsolescence

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Museum of Obsolescence
–Tracy K. Smith

Photo by Khashayar Kouchpeydeh on Unsplash

bee on a sill

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Bee on a Sill 
–Tracy K. Smith

Photo by Michael Milverton on Unsplash

logos

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Logos
–Tracy K. Smith

Photo by Chetan Kolte on Unsplash

snowdrops

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Snowdrops
–Sandra Lim

Spring comes forward as a late-winter confection, and I cannot decide if it advances a philosophy of meekness or daring.

This year’s snowdrops: is it that they are spare, and have a slightly fraught lucidity, or are they proof that pain, too, can be ornate?

Even a propped skull is human nature. And its humor is monstrous, rich with an existence that owes nothing to anyone.

Fat little pearls against the ice, battering softly, try even fewer qualities—

To say that you love someone or something to death is to hover around the draw of irrevocability.

More faith is asked of us, a trained imagination against the ice-white.

 

Photo by Aditya Vyas on Unsplash

sunflowers

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Sunflowers in the Median

–Natalie Homer

Everything is a union of one kind or another.
Foothills know this. Highways too.

In the median—wild sunflowers for miles.
Cheerful, unassuming. They are no one’s bouquet.

My dad and I try very hard to seem at ease
with each other. We comment on the bison

stampeding across the casino’s electric sign.
Pixilated, their clouded breath leads them

again and again over an imagined prairie.
Later I will make this drive every day,

memorize little landmarks: the row of cottonwoods,
the peaked shelter at the reservoir’s edge,

the water towers marking the reservation.
I will become so sick of the sagebrush,

the snow and the sun, an incessant blue sky,
that I’ll wilt to think of this place being home.

But today it’s a morning I’m not sorry to be awake for,
so that’s something. And no one mourns a coyote

with his russet head resting on the road’s shoulder.
Neither does the ditch fire elicit sympathy.

The sunflowers did not teach me this,
but their small faces look so cheerful

bouncing in the slipstream of traffic—
I will believe anything they say.

halfway

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Halfway

–Paula Mendoza

You were between two animals.
Between two attributions.
At the crotch of a river’s fork.
At a loss, at least.
Between all losses, tendering alms.
By the skin of one’s stolen teeth.
The lethargy of one newly shorn.
To derive, say, attenuate, say
starved to a taper. A porousness.
False asphodel if aphasic, if sticky.
Vaseline-smear a focalization.
Ocean maw and mountain blade
recede. At last, at least—this. A figure
gathers line and edge. She is between
two roars. Who devours or drowns.
Say shore when you mean precipice.
Say split when you mean in pieces.
Redoubled at the jut of some far
becoming. Between, to say the least.
A shade and its absorption. To
swatch a sea’s phonemes, to score
what of light she keeps to let through.
Photo by David Clarke on Unsplash

work without hope

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Work without Hope

–Samuel Taylor Coleridge

All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
         Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.

flight training

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flight training

–Shayla Lawz
sometimes i want to ask the earth,
was it beautiful          here
without us

or maybe you were lonely too

my nephew asks me why his paper airplane
never really flies    from here

& i ask the same of our bodies
is it the vessel; is it the way that we’re made
was the sky all lilac & orange for you too

how many nights have i been
at this window & when did it become a door
lately, i’ve been dreaming
evacuation;

of catapulting to a bright moon
& all this grief turned to
dust
to ocean
to blue light

all this dreaming makes me wonder
if there’s always been a sky
this close

in the air i am briefly starlit
& everything
is alive

Photo by Michael on Unsplash