scribblings

may 11&12

the writing

She was dayspring, & I was evenfall. She was the curiosity & the reveal, dancing in the spotlight—I was the secret, the hidden, keeping to the shadows. The opening versus the shutting of the eyes. So much life, versus…well. I was always the one who didn’t mind getting their hands dirty. To face a little ugliness for the beauty it would wrought. 
Of course I knew what I was doing was wrong. But I did think the results would make her happy. I thought she would forgive me, because the world would open up so beautifully before us. 

~

south wind, do you hear 
songs of rainfall & ruin 
of love buried deep ?

~

north wind, have you heard 
how spring still sleeps, feverish 
dreaming of cold hands ?

~

It was the music, cutting through the din of the market, that stirred a fleeting memory —she hurried after the piper, feeling like she was in a fairytale. This was reinforced when she rounded the corner of a building in her very urban city, & with a step & a blink, was in a forest. 
The piper waited for her. 

the reading

Poem: “Daughter” by Gabrielle Bates

“[…] I read all afternoon in my office on the third floor. 

A passage on shovels reminded me  
of crossing that one green pasture with my mother

before we buried her mother again, closer 
to our dead kin, the dairy bootleggers.

The dead can’t sleep if you’re always making noise, 
but I have never known a soul with my blood 
who wants to sleep, once dead, more than four days. […]”

Short Story: “The Walking” by M.J. Adkins

“I walk first because I am the least afraid. This is not the same as brave. I have simply run out of the part of myself that fears this. It went somewhere. I suspect it is already in the house, waiting for me. When I cross the threshold I will meet it again. It will not recognize me.
The fog came up out of the low field at moonrise, on the nights she is hungry. We do not say her name aloud on The Path. We said it once, in the hall, to confirm among ourselves that we all knew whose night this was. We did not say it again. We will not say it inside the house either. Names are how she finds the rest of you.”