2 Poems
The Language of Moles
Trees rust in the deep autumn
like skeletal Chevrolets abandoned in the woods
not far from where we are now. Listen —
you can hear acorns falling
from the sky like dead satellites, hitting
the grass with the soft finality
of a last breath. And the crows
are ecstatic — they swarm the sunset
in vacuous clouds, black
as the rippling shadows
battleships throw to the eastern waves,
dappling the fins of lingering sharks.
Decay is nothing new. We’ll all taste
graveyard dirt and suck rainwater
from dark yew roots. We’ll burrow
like cicadas into the sweet soil
and forget about burning skyscrapers
and the price of oil. We’ll know the soft
language of moles, the underworld’s
earthy vault, and, at last,
nothing else.
My Wife and the Ghost
And there was this.
A ghost that slivered itself from between worlds, leapt out of the snowy wolfwind on a
December midnight. Slipped between blocked basement walls like sight through a keyhole. It
woke the sleeping boy, the terrified boy who couldn’t move, against whose face the ghost
molded like wet clay over a form, into whose ears the ghost whispered unknown threats before
disappearing like snow melting upwards, backwards, into the hovering darkness.
And then again, on a rainy night. When I was older, and frozen in bed like a fish in an iced-
through pond, when blackdrip shadows flowed from a hole in the world, there, over by my
bookshelf, a coalescing darkthing that bull-rushed into me like a stormcloud slamming into a
mountain, sank into me like a sacrificed prince settling into a peat bog’s soft death. The redblack
molasses that flowed over my wide eyes, the world’s deep and terrible silence—not the rain’s
teeth against the window, not the ceiling fan’s cyclic whir, not the old house creaking and
popping in the night. Only blood rivering through my heart.
And then there was this.
My wife woke me, long later. Moon like a tooth through the curtains, her still-sleeping eyes like
shuttered windows, her arm like an arrow pointing to a corner darkness by the closet, an
impenetrable cavedarkness into which she told me to stare and see the thing watching us. Ice in
my mouth, salt on my tongue, my jaw shot through with steel pins, her pointing hand suddenly a
fist, a strong claw choking the silent air, the squirming shadows. The pure darkness that suddenly
seemed less dark.
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