Issue 115

Ambulatory, patterned hours, the cell’s
circumference, countable cinder blocks, the darkness,
the lock, the tick of a wristwatch through midnight and beyond.

What he saw both entertained and startled him:
his head and face repeated in a corridor
of bizarre, ever-shrinking iterations,
a duplicate geometry of selves

After they bury me I suppose they will toast
my unparalleled capacity for wasting time or
proclivity for spinning wild yarns. Of my soufflés
they will say what they must.

Nothing will die when we’re together.

Until he leapt four stories toward death
my father didn’t believe in God, he said,
but himself, yet the tech in the medevac

swore, as the helicopter lifted, he asked
whether Jesus loved him.

It may come
that I don’t

make it out.

If anything is worth living for, worth singing an imperfect offering to, it is the low and the small.

There’s something like prayer I’ve always bit on my tongue but then I can immediately taste the blood afterwards. You’re old enough to know now my father says to me.