1489 c/o Rebecca Perry

amazed by the caution of human gesture

i

breathe your lungs out into the air
maybe the birds will feel the expansion of it.

ii

perhaps the air right now
could only smell this one way
with its billion component parts
and dead skin of the not-living
and fires and weather conditions
and tastes of spices in and out
of our mouths, insides, mouths

iii

we carry the small fragments of ourselves
like parrots on our shoulders
the socks lined up neat as conkers
the firmly held belief that it is lucky
to be hit in the face by a falling leaf.

iv

we are allowed to cry in the toilets at work
when someone young dies
quickly and quietly.

v

i feel as if my body once held two people
and now I am lost inside this stretched out skin
a little deaf, perhaps heartbroken,
walking on, unable to keep out the cold.

vi

there are heroes, yes
people mountains were made for

vii

when there is not enough for us
we will go to the moon
and dig and break. we will gather
up sunlight and bring it back
in drums and boxes and vaults

viii

you – pen, paper, biscuit –
saying house, bridge, fountain, gate,
jug, tall grass, fruit-tree, window –
at most: column, tower, castle

ix

see: the Rider, the Staff, Fruit-Garland
see stars - see both living and being dead,
or the possibility of it.
see Ursa Major, see the one that looks like
a something and then something else again

x

tell me how good it is
to wake from a bad dream
and have someone there and I will tell you
how butterfly wings stay dry in the rain

1488 c/o Cami Park

The Night of the Day the Khoi-Khoi Meet
Bartolomeu Dias and Crew

It keeps coming back to the end of the world. Dogs sitting on roofs, birds flying about indoors, clattering locusts.


The sheep's paunch is torn down the middle, spilling dung, and tossed on the fire to roast. Bartered wine is passed mouth to mouth around the circle around the fire. The chief tells this story--


Tsui-Goab, creator of rocks and stones, bringer of rain and storm, magician, warrior, the first of us all, having killed evil once and for all after many battles and deaths and resurrections, sent a hare from his home in the clouds to give People-People this message: "As I die and dying am born again, so you shall die and dying live again." But the hare was stupid, and delivered the message thusly: "As I die and dying am born again, so you shall die and dying not be born again." When the hare repeated to Tsui-Goab the message it had delivered, Tsui-Goab hit the hare on the nose, cleaving its lip. Such is the hare.


They had come, hands free of ash, already soaking wet, sallow. Thin fabrics clung to their chests like petals. As the flowers of our daughters taken by angry rain was our doom.


She strums the instrument received for cattle. Her name is the sound of trapped birds; the slap on the cow's rump the slur of eyes on her, she can't form these with her tongue and palate; she looks to the moon and tries with her fingers.


We bend to our natures as trees to the wind.

1487 c/o xTx

1487

Ishmael worked the salt farm. When the old bull grew weary, he pulled the plow by hand. When the rains came, he collected it in trenches. The rainwater would irrigate the salt plants should the river he relied upon become dry. Without the river, the salt farm would not last the season. Without the river, Ishmael’s family would likely perish.

As it almost had once before.

This season, the salt plants grew steady and even. The sturdy green stems so heavy with salt, they sagged like the branches of the willows that dotted the road to the village.

Every day he thanks the Gods.

Ishmael harvested a grand salt crop and he and his wife celebrated with dance and drink. They made sacrificial tithes to the Gods, giving thanks for their successful harvest. There would be heat in his hearth and food in his larder for another year and this knowing gave Ishmael comfort.

It gave Ishmael hope.

He remembered the year the Gods punished the village, sending the dragons whose fiery breath dried the river to barely a stream. His salt fields burned into the earth giving him a harvest of charcoal.

Ishmael and his wife lived on the bits of charcoal, making teas, thin breads, and gruel; their bodies begging for any nutrients they knew the salt could give, even in its blackened state. In time, their bodies withered to mere bones and skin. The days grew thin, still and hollow.

As fate would lay its heavy hand, the year the Gods sent the dragons was the year they birthed their first child; a son. Knowing he would surely die; Ishmael took his son to the caves where the dragons slept and laid him upon the bare ground, begging the forgiveness of the Gods.

His heart had never been as heavy as it was when he turned his back and walked away from his infant son, left lying there on the cold, cold ground. The babe’s jerky, desultory movements created a gentle susurrus of the swaddling which filled Ishmael’s ears as he made his way down the path.

He never cried…his son. A sign of courage, Ishmael hoped, picking up his pace lest he lose his own.

His son…even in his newness to the world…was brave, Ishmael told himself. Maybe he would’ve wielded a warrior’s sword had he grown, Ishmael mused, instead of a mere farmer’s trowel, like his father had, and his father before him. This belief Ishmael held in his heart like a sort of comfort or punishment. He wasn’t sure which.


Ishmael’s sacrifice succeeded in pacifying the hunt of the dragon, and restoring the rage of the river. The blackness of the salt fields turning back into browns and then greens again, the work resumed and with every new day, they did their best to put their sacrifice behind them.

Their sacrifice…nay, their son.

At night, after supper, his wife would put on a kettle and boil water for tea. They’d sit across from one another in silence, just sipping quietly. Sometimes she’d be weaving. He’d smoke, and in the quiet of their busy keeping, with hearth full of fire, and a field full of salt, Ishmael thought that maybe it was time to make another warrior.

1486 c/o Jason Lee Norman

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa is trying
to Say Something to His Mother

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa wants to say something to his mother. He only gets his best ideas while in the shower or in a deep sleep. It is nearly impossible to write something meaningful in the shower. Agrippa wants to say something meaningful to his mother, he wants to use love words. When Agrippa thinks of saying these things to his mother he becomes embarrassed and wants to go back to bed. If only his mother was sick, Agrippa thought, like deathly ill- then maybe he would be able to say the things that he wants to say to his mother. Once, when his mother was ill with flu, Agrippa came into her room to wake her and bring orange juice. If he woke her she might seem groggy and disoriented enough to feign the appearance of a dying woman. Agrippa would use that opportunity to thank his mother for giving him life and sandwiches. The songs that she used to sing to him still dance in his head while he wrangles equations. The stars in the cosmos spell out her name.

Agrippa says nothing. Agrippa searches desperately for a pencil. Agrippa is a simple man. Agrippa believes in magic. He wants to say something to his mother. He wants to thank her for giving him life. Will that sound trite? Ridiculous? Agrippa is happy with life, with being alive, and prefers it to the alternative. Not existing would be too much to bear.

It is possible, Agrippa thought, that his mother could be dying right now. She may put down her cup of tea and not pick it up again because she would be dead. This clearing of her throat could be the last noise she ever makes and he will have no rich words to fill the silence with. Agrippa feels as though he is at the bottom of a pool. His mother lifts her cup of tea. Her final sip?

Agrippa dives into the couch cushions for a pencil.

1485 c/o Jesse Malmed

The Sweating Sickness

The sweating sickness sounds like a kind of inane thing until you hear how many people were killed by it. It’s a question of branding, I suppose. While sweating sickness does locate us temporally (English at that time wasn’t too sophisticated and so even its best speakers would be at like a fourth grade level by now standards), it doesn’t do much to make clear the overwhelm of the time.

First: the disgusting amounts of shvitz, everywhere. Everybody looking like they’d been pumping all day long. You remember those Gatorade commercials where the athletes’ sweat was the neon drink itself? Everyone was doing this then! And then dying! The cities were littered with Gatorade-drenched corpses! They said if you lasted 24 hours you’d be ok. Well ok, I mean, very well. You’ve just got to find a way to stay cool those first 24. Just don’t think about the green liquid cutting a cute slalom down your cheek. Try not to notice how many of your friends and aldermen are stacking up in the gutter, their Gatorade sweats commingling to produce incandescent, 2015-style mash-ups.

So when you ask me why I don’t want to take a jog with you, why I’m so meticulous about where my sweatbands are and the temperature I keep my pod and then I close my eyes and start mumbling to make the anxiety go away, well, I mean, that’s how come.