Jake is sitting in the middle of the yard in a lawn chair. The rain had softened but it’s starting up again. Jake has a straight bourbon rocks in one hand. He places it on the white plastic table beside him and goes inside the house and gets his four-iron and then he sits back down in the middle of the yard.

All the spiders
In my father’s coffin

All the termites
In the oak casket
Of my mother

Whip the Bones by Melissa Wiley

This is how she bakes her body into a soufflé. Without access to bowls, eggs, or oven, she crosses her arms into a knot tied with ligaments. She stares at pillows cross-stitched with leaves hardened into lemons. Only the leaves are attacked by butterflies, she can’t help but notice. The leaves have no trees while the butterflies are monstrous.
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It had an eye like a glossy blackcurrant, dead and alive.

The previous night had all been a low rise motorway service stations with a mysterious enemy jet flaring NASA sized nostrils as they skimmed the terrain and away.

Stands rigid
on one pale leg,
the other tucked

its brown wings,
a piece of bark
fallen onto grass.

It does not fly,
keeps the ground
close to itself

Cool blasts of slow fluorescence
Drop vague never-shifting shadows from
Filing cabinets desks computers—
Shadows like humid
Visibility, air
You can see, like refugee
Rain clouds inspissipated in this
Funereal, strangely
Unreal place—
And moving with members
Of the staff reveal
Visual transitions
Somewhat forbidden.
More light than heat.

poem #4, "FLOOD MY BLOOD"
i extend my arms
okay
a man raises his and
they fall
from 2" past my elbow

clinging to the roots
of the wild onions pulled
from the garden each spring.
Holding fast to thin white
filament, heedless the
whole enterprise is failing;
resolute, even when shaken—
refugees quietly settling the
shallow lines of your palm,
still hopeful for asylum
in the murderous country.

This is how she bakes her body into a soufflé. Without access to bowls, eggs, or oven, she crosses her arms into a knot tied with ligaments. She stares at pillows cross-stitched with leaves hardened into lemons. Only the leaves are attacked by butterflies, she can’t help but notice. The leaves have no trees while the butterflies are monstrous.

2 POEMS by

G r a h a m e  H i n t o n - B a r b e r

Inocea.

Nomolecule iscomplete istheTHING that comprises this moment / NoMORE inthis inthin there is a degree that separates my perception / andit itfits fitsin a FIN separates an ocean / It is a perception of momentum which brings the future- in part- tooooothe
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I feel the unmown grass nettle my spine
as I lie gazing at shape-shifting clouds.
First a duck, then a boat and a bearded man
on a late summer afternoon at our cabin.
The sun arcs west intent on soon ending
this day on my tiny patch of Earth.

An orphaned planet was discovered
floating through space with no light,
no life.

Starlight can shine below the visual
threshold of the human eye.

As a boy I would watch Orion
from the outdoor patio
while my parents drank.

Eventually our own sun
will expand to incinerate
Mercury and Venus at least.

Of Orion the central star of his sword
is the Orion Nebula. Not a star at all.

In the winter of oh-six, the fortune cookie plant in town closed down after a communion wafer company from North Carolina bought it out and it left everyone in town pressed for a job. Everyone still drank as much as they did when they'd had work to blame their drinking on, that didn't change. What changed was how people got a hold of money to pay for their fixes, which made the town buzz a bit more. Smith, Thompson and I were sixteen then, with the usual thoughts that boys have slinking and smiling on their way from their brains down to the most southern tips of their extremities. We had those thoughts every second of every minute and we always thought they'd stay thoughts because between the three of us, the best our combined physical features could have made if put together would have resembled something similar to a deer's ass. So we did the most logical thing we could think of to turn those sticky thoughts into action. We started a band. I played bass, Smith played drums, and Thompson sang. We got a gig at The Nose Job a few miles away in Glamadis because Smith's sister knew one of the sound guys, and we told him we could play the first half of some record I can't remember.

Nomolecule iscomplete istheTHING that comprises this moment
NoMORE inthis inthin there is a degree that separates my perception
andit itfits fitsin a FIN separates an ocean
It is a perception of momentum which brings the future- in part- tooooothe