Maureen Thorson

ALT Michael Homolka ETERNAL RECURRENCE Life expects too little of us, then it expects too much. Rain throttles the balcony in a country you barely remember. Curtains settle against approaching clouds. “Casablanca” on repeat, the family wanders in and out of darkness with slices of pie. Soon everyone dies or resolves into rifts. Always gossip, always money. It's possible to reason your way through grief. People say it's not, but it is. Distant navy ships hang on the horizon on journeys neither forward nor back. Grocery store lighting comes close to solace. I think how rude I've become to everyone, how unspiritual this is. If you were life, would you want people picking you apart? Restless sky, impermeable ocean. Gentle walks along the rock weed. An inlet.

ALT MY DRAGONFLY ROARING YOUR ENGINES My dragonfly roaring your engines Through my five senses soar, As, seeking for its origin, The bird goes up through the shower. And over all that distance can Or time will put between us, Rise O my rainbow and make span Over what intervenes. On their cotillion axles spin And take our silver kisses in The automatic stars Like penny pianolas. But far from me as my home is You move, and do not rest, With on your lip my thousand mile kiss And the grief at the breast.

ALT Denton Loving ABOUT THE BEGINNING Let others argue about who's to blame. Eve or Adam or the serpent. God for knowing what would happen and allowing it. Let others debate whether the tree was date, fig, or pomegranate. (It was never an apple.) I choose to celebrate the time after the expulsion. The kitchen. The rough-hewn table Adam built for Eve and their progeny. The harvest of all that grew wild outside the garden—apricots, almonds, olives, grapes. That short time when the knife we shared was sharpened only to cut our hunger.

ALT Waiting Room It is possible to pass a whole life like this, half-harkening, perusing a backlog of Vanity Fair. It is possible to hang on the turn of a knob without wanting the thing on the door's other side. You could grow old here, your sight skating the eights that ivy up the wallpaper while reruns run. It is possible to pass years waiting, unyearning, and still to start at a voice announcing your name.

ALT Dress Rehearsal BY CHLOE HONUM Branches etch the film of ice on the studio window. A crow looks in, hopping and shrieking when I dance in my black tutu, trimmed with silver. The ballet master says, “you are its mother.” But in a crow's sky-knowing mind could I be so misconstrued? Out of the blackest cold-wet air, the crow seems molded. The stars will not wake up to guide it back to the creek of shadows where it was formed. Practice, practice. I am smoke in darkness, climbing away from a burning hut, in an otherwise empty field on which the fire is slight and low, and the rest of it is snow.

ALT Black Stone Lying On A White Stone I will die in Paris, on a rainy day, on some day I can already remember. I will die in Paris—and I don't step aside— perhaps on a Thursday, as today is Thursday, in autumn. It will be a Thursday, because today, Thursday, setting down these lines, I have put my upper arm bones on wrong, and never so much as today have I found myself with all the road ahead of me, alone. César Vallejo is dead. Everyone beat him although he never does anything to them; they beat him hard with a stick and hard also with a rope. These are the witnesses: the Thursdays, and the bones of my arms, the solitude, and the rain, and the roads . . .

ALT KAREN CHASE AT NIGHT MY SOUL LEAVES my body and in the morning, it returns. To exist fully, it needs more than my body, so up it goes into the stars, for sustenance. I open my eyes and pray— “You have returned within me, my soul with compassion.” “Modah ani lefaneka melechai chai vekayam shehehezarta” I get out of bed, join the revolution.

ALT Mirror, Mirror BY TOM HEALY What do we do when we hate our bodies? A good coat helps. Some know how to pull off a hat. And there are paints, lighting, knives, needles, various kinds of resignation, the laugh in the mirror, the lie of saying it doesn't matter. There is also the company we keep: surgeons and dermatologists, faith healers and instruction-givers, tailors of cashmere and skin who send their bills for holding our shame-red hands, raw from the slipping rope, the same hands with which we tremble ever so slightly, holding novels in bed, concentrating on the organization of pain and joy we say is another miror, a depth, a conjure in which we might meet someone who says touch me.

ALT He loved . . . He loved three things in life: Evensong, white peacocks And old maps of America. He hated it when children cried, He hated tea with raspberry jam And women's hysterics. . . . And I was his wife. November 9, 1910 Kiev

ALT What the God of Fire Charged Me “Pague lo que el dios de fuego/me cobró”—Ana Ilce Each turn is the one that mocks the old order and when the revolution happens another readies itself. Like the surge ofblood in spring or the lost hope of a winter where kisses were too few or too many. You will say, "She's romantic." And you will be correct. But one dimension is only one dimension. The others remain unseen. Be wary. When the night watch ends and the sun rises—a smile on land and water— I worry less about the dreams I cannot suppress but more about the life I am so willing to live. One turn, then the other. A fire walk as prelude. A dance best forgiven.

ALT Automatic Reply I hope this email finds you well finds you watching the heron break the blued-out beech tree to pieces with her flight finds you zooming in with the phone to catch the dark family of deer munching something at the tree line & stopping when you pop your gum I hope it finds you walking to check the mail or mail the check finds you searching the creek for the flashes of catfish getting fatter & braver every week I hope you are braving this all in comfortable boots you who I might never meet you who I can't stop talking to

ALT HALLOWEEN This is the day the children Dress as the dead. In their disguises All evening they play Hell with our evening, Our terrors in their muslins. Skeletons in high hats, Perennial little queens, They come back shrieking. We are the kindly ones And we feed them Their annual meal, a handful Of sugar the shape of corn, Apples, a rope of black candy. All year they starve for this food In a trunk in the basement. And then they are gone. They scream back to their houses. One day we will lay them away Forever, the thin disguises, Papery, perishing stuffs. They say, “The apples were full of knives. We will never return.”

ALT Obedience That smokestack, for instance, in the vacant lot across the street: if she could order it down and watch it float in lapse-time over buckled tar and macadam it would stop an inch or two perhaps before her patent leather shoes. Her body's no longer tender, but her mind is free. She can think up a twilight, sulfur licking orange then black as the tip of a flamingo's wing, the white picket fence marching up the hill . . . but she would never create such puny stars. The house, shut up like a pocket watch, those tight hearts breathing inside— she could never invent them.

ALT Time BY JOHN WIENERS Why is it eternity lasts a moment a moment eternity? Are you quiet enough to hear horned owls at dawn? I hear voices rustle in the leaves after they are gone. New mice burst into life. Small raccoons bear tiny chains around their wrists.

ALT He Had a Terrible Childhood BY JULIEN STRONG my mother tells me, and proceeds to elaborate at gruesome length. But don't all gods and heroes get off to a rocky start? Young Theseus thrashed in his fish shack, Zeus sent abroad to avoid being lunch for his dad. I am twelve and obsessed with Greek myths. I won't repeat the gory details of my mother's story here, but the gist is, faced with the madness of monsters who were his parents, the god in our basement made his mind a labyrinth and retreated inside it, where he invented everything but the way out. I felt it the first time I met him, shying away from him as a horse does a broken bridge. Though in time I learned to cross it—home was on the other side: my mother, shelter, bed. Do you think I shouldn't have married him? she asked me once. It must have been my senior year of high school. I kept silent. Like Cassandra I had a knack for sight yet there was nothing I could have said.

ALT Yes, the Fish Music A trout-colored wind blows through my eyes, through my fingers, and I remember how the trout used to hide from the dinosaurs when they came to drink at the river. The trout hid in subways, castles and automobiles. They waited patiently for the dinosaurs to go away.

ALT Leaves BY URSULA K. LE GUIN Years do odd things to identity. What does it mean to say I am that child in the photograph at Kishamish in 1935? Might as well say I am the shadow of a leaf of the acacia tree felled seventy years ago moving on the page the child reads. Might as well say I am the words she read or the words I wrote in other years, flicker of shade and sunlight as the wind moves through the leaves.

ALT Sunflower Sonnet Number One But if I tell you how my heart swings wide enough to motivate flirtations with the trees or how the happiness of pasion freaks inside me, will you then believe the faithful, yearning freeze on random, fast explosions that I place upon my lust? Or must I say the streets are bare unless it is your door I face unless they are your eyes that, rare as tulips on a cold night, trick my mind to oranges and yellow flames around a seed as deep as anyone may find in magic? What do you need? I’ll give you that, I hope, and more But don't you be the one to choose me: poor.