Poetry

Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter

By ANGELA VERONICA WONG 

 

Dear Johnny,
In your last letter, you requested
. Take my photograph down, you wrote. Disremember.
Yesterday M started talking. All at once, as if inside, she had alphabets that ached to break
out. We were                                 and relieved. We               it would never happen. Johnny, the
tomato plant takes water as if in love, and a map upside down is still a map. The arrows,
,              . I’ve
.                placed Europe above the         .      It hangs like our                   .
Every morning, I
. I trace where you could be: Newbury, Canterbury,                 ,
Maidstone, Kent.         will bring you to another place: Merville, Pas de Calais, Caen,
. You are pushing through fields. In          , one cloud like an apology. I
think the word verdant, and it brings me closer to             . I       the word tomorrow. It
a falling body.                                                     . Johnny, I am busy          history.
We were climbing a hill in                   . The ice soaked through our mittens. I
. You                        . Johnny, the ocean has salt
enough without your blood. I feel your hurried fear, tendoned and tight. You make your
body small. We split at what seems              . We
.   Johnny,                                        .
There are so many spaces my body needs filled.                   Love, your dark-haired
doll.

Dear Johnny, In Your Last Letter
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The Net

By DANIEL TOBIN
Translated loosely from a lost Akkadian tablet
discovered among the ruins of Kush.


God of the first waters, Ea, listen,
You who parsed chaos with a net from the day:
Unfasten your knots, let the swells replenish
From subtlest channels, from the seams of flesh.
The galaxies circuit in their bright delay.
The least wind tempts me with what might have been.

The Net
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Parasitical

By DANIEL TOBIN
Despite having no lungs and unable to breathe, the second
head displays signs of independent consciousness…. 


The first fiction is
I’m talking to you at all,
the more amorphous
of my own Janus head, the god
alive and compassing
what has gone and what
is coming, though
which is which is
hard to say. Did I say
my own? I meant ours, my
sister twin, the comelier

Parasitical
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Land Rush

By STEPHEN HAVEN
Each evening my half-coon hound dog buries her snout
In her foul dish then comes up singing, moans, complains
About her condition, until I hook her up, let her shit
And piss among the graves—who’s watching, anyway?—
The groundskeepers all home by then, their evening shows
Just flickering, the trees along the forested edge
Leaning as always toward distant centuries.

Land Rush
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