A Magazine of Many Arts

Against the face of night, a white moon hoves
into view; a hostage, bound and fevered
by a titan’s gravitic caress.

Responding to him, trammeled
by a fellow captive’s jealous chains,
her inner ice melts, yielding
to the sweet torment
of gravity’s exquisite duress,
bending and quivering,
buckling and shivering.

Four parallel scars rake down her belly,
left by a celestial tiger’s claws;
she bleeds ice-mist in torrents,
trailing veils of crane-down behind her,
shattered wings.

She wraps herself in her mist, pressing snow
to her breast to conceal her ravaged, pockmarked skin,
bleeds out her essence to the void,
heedless in her ecstasy,
leaving a trail of frozen tears behind.

Those feathers that do return to her,
as she’s slowly devoured by her lover’s
ungentle embrace,
fall back to her skin like knives of cold stone.

Self-destroying, self-creating;
blinded by her rapture,
she whirls around her beloved,
entranced; while within her laboring core,
dragons struggle to birth themselves
through the caesarian cuts
left by the tiger’s surgical claws;
strive to shatter the shell of their mother,
their ice-white egg.

The heat within her heart
that engendered them,
will, in time, spell their dissolution,
when she gives herself up to her lover entirely,
dissolves herself and spreads out
as a final shimmering ring
of transitory ice.

And so, with each pass
of the orbital dance,
the universe pauses,
waiting to see
what kind of fabulous monsters
have been born.

The metal of the plow drives through black earth,
grinding when it strikes hidden rocks,
as when a boat’s keel finds a reef’s coral fingers;
the stones bite the metal, chew flakes from its edge.

The plowman steadies himself beneath a cloud-veined sky—
the last sliver of the moon peers at him,
like a closing eye, veiled,
as the sun lurks just below the horizon.
He stoops to study the damaged plow blade;
his heart yearns for the quickening of the equinox;
his waning, eroded spirit thirsts for spring.

Winter-grown nettles pluck his flesh
as he breaks open the furrow with his blade,
spiteful thorn-vines clutch him, pull him down,
gashing his head on the plow—
blood to feed the hungry earth.

As he struggles to rise, he spots a chick
fallen from its nest in a tree near the field,
struggling to escape the ground,
even as the farmer does.

A hungry fox snaps it up;
his vision widens, somehow
seeing through the thorn-vines,
twining up the chick’s blighted tree,
cascading down into a glade where
a wolf takes down a broken-legged fawn,
snaking hungry tangles into the den
where the pups wait, ravenous.

The vine’s tangles spread everywhere,
looping even around cocoons
of reborn butterflies as they’re plundered
by new-woken wasps,
and he feels the thorns of it
biting into his flesh,
like the crows
who have come
to join the feast.

He struggles to his feet
but new tendrils coil and clutch
with vernal strength
dragging him down to plowed soil
where sharp thorns probe for ingress
into his flesh, and vines
tighten, lashing him
to the ground.

Thorns and talons
beaks and claws,
the rending of flesh;
his life pours
into the furrows
of the barren field,
his perception
flowing like ink,
shrinking, sinking
fading into
the earth.

While his
waning
spirit
welcomes
oblivion.

illustration is – Wölfe reissen einen Hirsch (1855) by Friedrich Gauermann

His hands work, flaying the hide from the deer,
parting the sinews that bind it to flesh
with a stone-flake knife; murmuring apologies
and gratitude for the gift of its life.

Dripping, he drapes it over his shoulders;
feels the still-warm blood course down his spine,
feels the weight of the antlered skull upon his brow,
feels the wet sinews bind to his flesh.

His hands clench to fists, become hooves, his spine
contorts—and then he races away through
the woods, fleeing pursuers more deadly
than any mere wolf.

When he comes to rest in a cold camp,
fireless, he strips off the borrowed skin,
but leaves the head in place—a mask with
sightless eyes, carved from flesh, and hard as bone.

Wolves come, having scented wounded deer,
but whine and press bellies to earth when they
meet his lifeless eyes; they know he is no prey.
They gather close and warm him until dawn.

When his pursuers come too close, the wolves
begin to howl, and the man puts back on his skin—
flees as the wolves harass the men who pursue him.
At sunset he returns to find their bodies, fletched.

Weeping, he thanks them for their kindness,
and then his hands work once more,
separating supple skin and soft fur,
settling it over his shoulders once more.

His nose touches earth; he catches the scent
of those who pursue him—and this time
when he leaps from the brambles it is he
who hunts for them.

Dug in under ice, rock,
where stars don’t twinkle,
but remain hard, cold, distant dots.

Look up: Io’s belching sulfur again—
droplets flung across the void,
caught by unseen winds,
rain against the surface.

Europa and Ganymede shoulder
into view, fleeting across the face
of the monster that chains us all.

Squint: you can just see auroras
dancing like ghosts, spirits, around
Ganymede, as the king’s tongue,
radiation-laden, licks his fleeing favorite.

His swollen red eye peers at us
as water-miner drones lift off,
returning to ships waiting in higher orbit.

Here, we’re far from his leering gaze,
his lecherous tongue, his groping gravity.
And yet, we never feel quite safe;
we’re trapped, like all his other lovers.

image by ESO/M. Kornmesser, downloaded from http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1615a/

Deborah L. Davitt

When you go to South America
and drop a lot of money
for an authentic
spiritual cleanse
and try to ignore the locals
laughing at the tourists
who’re here for an
ayahuasca high colonic
to the brainstem;
 
when you’ve swallowed
herbal purgatives and laxatives
(herbal and organic
are always better,
don’t you know?),
and have crouched, quaking,
on a toilet,
vomiting into a bucket,
while your intestines clarify
at both ends;
 
when you’ve done all these things,
in search of a sacred,
transcendent moment
of oneness with the universe,
it’s probably not a wonder,
that everyone’s spirit-animal
turns out to be impressive;
everyone’s always guided
by something fierce—
tigers and lions and bears,
oh my—
 
because when you’ve dropped
several thousand dollars
for the privilege of
feeling like you have the flu
for six hours,
no one wants to know
that their spirit-animal is a snail,
that the guiding energy in their lives
is that of a hermit crab,
and it’s hard to dress up
a jellyfish as the ultimate predator
that it is, when
most people think of them
as a synonym for spineless.
 
So, mysteriously, there’s a world
full of people out there,
with fierce and prideful totems
stalking through the universe
at their sides,
when statistically speaking,
at least ninety percent of eight billion people,
should actually be deer,
or llamas,
or the occasional inoffensive squirrel.

Deborah L. Davitt

I never thought of bread
as a living thing, but it is,
a colony of yeast bacteria
given living space and food
in a matrix of earth-given grain,
sea-born salt, and sky-born water;
they exhale their own breath
to make their city rise,
and we freeze them in place
with fiery oven heat.
 
Little wonder then,
that the Romans brought bread
and wine for libation
to the graves of their ancestors,
and sent the living food
down feeding tubes
to the bones and ashes
to appease the hungry ghosts;
 
little wonder, too,
that on Dia de la Muerte,
people for whom that language
hangs richly on their tongues
set out living bread for the dead,
marked with bones,
or Chimalma’s tears.
 
Maybe the ghosts can sniff out
the life in it, the bacteria
still struggling to survive
their own cremation,
entombed in the rigid shape
of their own mobile grave;
maybe they have to respect
the struggle to endure,
so like their own;
maybe, like the living,
they just like the smell
of hot, buttered bread,
fresh from the oven,
and cling to the heels
as we bring the last pieces
to our churning mouths.
 
Maybe they slide lusciously
down into our gullets,
ingested with the bread
and perhaps the wine
that we pour into glasses
instead of on the grass;
maybe they become a part of us,
and leave the graveside
nestled in our hearts and bowels,
instead of lingering
to stare at futile plastic roses
left to fade in the sun.

Deborah L. Davitt

You tore down our mother’s temples,
fearing that to give glory to her,
the Queen of Heaven,
she who treads the sea, Asherah,
would take glory from him
who was her husband,
who divided his land from her sea,
Elkunirsa—more lately El
(which means Lord to those who remember
their Hittite—most don’t, these days).
 
You preferred to wander the desert
far from her shores;
you forgot her forgiveness, tenderness,
when faced with his wrath.
 
We forgot nothing on her shores,
transformed to guardian pillars
licked with her salt;
 
you abandoned our mother, your mother,
so we came for your daughters
with all the tenderness you’d forgotten,
taught them to find their wings within.
 
You called yourselves blessed
when you saw the grandchildren,
so strong, intelligent, and noble,
but as we slumbered, stone once more,
you forgot, and they forgot.
 
We never forget.
 
Awakening inside our descendants,
daughters of men and gods,
we wonder why you fear us so—
is it for the divine grace
burning under our skins?
Is it for the wings of flame
you cannot see, but surely sense?
 
This time, we won’t let you forget,
searing our mother’s name
into your souls
with a brand
of molten salt.