Issue #11

Richard Layne

Tracking Stars

You’re out back,
Tracking stars with your telescope,
Plotting progress against the cold night sky.

The train yard beyond the woods is full of activity
The hard match strike of the engine as it fires
You don’t want to be here.

You look back towards your house.
The lighted lone window where she’s watching TV
You go back to your telescope

The labored breathing,
blowing of the locomotives as they work their way up the tracks,
Moving cars into the line.

It’s cold. The night sky is vibrant black.
You track the stars
Saiph, Rigel, Bellatrix

You wonder how things turn out this way
Small things set into place,
words spoken. Action taken.

You listen to the engines push.
Push the weighted tons forward,
The crunch of metal on metal

The light in the house goes out.
The whole place is dark.
You lose Sirius in the telescope and squint into blackness and vapored breath.

The train cars collide and lurch forward, faster and faster
Like dominoes falling.
You look back toward the house again and don’t think about going in.

The squeal and hum of momentum

Richard Layne has never published before. He is an area manager by day and a writer by night.

Annie Blake

DEUS MEUS, DEUS MEUS, UT QUID DERELIQUISTI ME

for Johnny

i have lived this day before    my mother’s mother
is watching me    we know not to exchange
words    we know of each other’s aura
white stone fountain sculptured during the war
how ancient is this water that pours from her mouth
the vintage taste of sun    mothball scent of her coat
primordial    marble white    the sun today    idyllic
her lavender bouquets suspended
like chandeliers in hallways

my father is wholed with absences    love
contains a wedding ring and an upside down mountain
outside laundry suds in a silver tub    yachts on the bay
the simplicity of fine white sails    my teacher’s guillotine cutters
folded paper planes    seagulls shedding their bone webs
on the sea    i stand on the sky    my arms outstretched
like the light of a bulb    diffusion    their connectedness
antithesis    immolation    live milk of my tooth

the shimmer of paintings on the walls are visions
of my life before i was born    before the sailing of lights
the sun is a gold ladle dipped sideways into the bay
seaweed    hair like black guipure    the combat
of fish    i arrange the white feather
of cowardice on my son like a crown    integumentary

my mother was relieved she died    airplanes
can glide under bridges tire marks and telephone wires
congruence    even if no one else says so    nature
in containment    smooth pavement    reclusive
not bothered with wire angles or hooks    apathetic
to the unfettered winks of coins in the glint
water    seamed by men    sometimes pebbles are paths that lie
for me on a summer’s day        the moon    marble cold

THE PROHIBITION OF APHRODITE

for Rein

happiness    the skim of paint under the lid
before we hammer on the ceiling
for most    air gets in    a membrane of paint    plastic
that slimes and slides    air
doesn’t get into my body    currents and polarities instead

all the people i carry    their fine musculature    whole
bodies    they emboss my cornices like aphros on the sea
in limbo    they are tired of waiting for me
their arms dangle    moldy fruit    their layering
of bodies draping and as pliable as jam
just above the picture rails    the grimace of their limbs
when i display them like photographs    musty museum

the drawstring of this bag is invisible    where is
this space of safe    people with skin talk to me    i don’t understand
gesticulations    sometimes loving someone is protecting
them    giving them half the apple
hiding the rest for dessert in heaven

the winds howl like veined grey marble in winter
like the angels my father drew    the paint
viscous against my skin    my protuberances in bondage
i am a conduit    my feet are unsewn clams
collecting menstruation    internal injury    my hands a chalice

there are multiple skies    voluptuous pleasure    aphrodite
her tongue    a paint brush    a chisel    sculptress
cultivated wind in her body    of the high renaissance    ears
of orichalc    glides open the sheer of her latissimus dorsi
i have always been part of a painting on the ceiling
i am afraid    of the dome of masklessness

i don’t like being awake for too long    they don’t notice
how the suburban communication wires don’t apply to me
as she pulls me high up the stairs in the church    her womb a walnut
but out of wedlock

when my children play under the birch they thresh
the catkins    administer the seeds    harvest rain
over the bride and groom    the earth    grainy sacrifice of spring

satan    licks the surplus cream off his spoon
tells me he is sure he knows me from somewhere    bruising
my ligaments in the vice    slinging hooks through my ankles
i wash the walls with sugar soap when my tenants leave my house

give me    a softer crown    calla lilies construed from my skin
                                                                        antlers on butterflies

THE ROOTING OF BIRDS

roots are so long    the tree airs its leaves inside the clouds
muddy paths    look like molten silver    under    the moon
is a woman    why doesn’t she grow her own light
her breath is warmer because she comes to me in the dark
hosts in the hooks of owls    she gives
the branches green in the wind    they grow nubs
like an aisle sprouting with people    they turn in
their leaves and make mercy    her lips    dripping liquor
for men    sleeping helps to solve riddles    my father died
without telling me the truth    maybe he didn’t own any
he blamed roots for breaking his path

i’m fed up with hard concrete    rods of iron keep it impenetrable
when he died    his body pill bugged into a question mark
he thought i was a whore    i hang pages on the line
instead of clothes    the words are in bits    ink is absorbed
from right to left    i keep reading aloud because you pretend
you don’t care what i’m saying    preservation is instinctual

i realized i was burning the eyes out of birds    they speak to me
i understand why they have beaks
they keep smacking into my window    my boy keeps tripping
down the stairs    glass is not concrete    i have made bars
with my arms and legs    curtains with my cut hair
i don’t like the way birds let their young flop to the ground
how they always die for me

EATING ROSES

you are the milk plumping the thorns
of the cane. it is as pleasurable
as suckling. there is something about how heavy
and bifurcated you are—i am half
of you. i lie on my back and on that last thorn
my eyes roll back. it probably has more to do with autoeroticism.

maybe i would rather die than be distracted by you—
maybe i don’t want to know what you think of me
when you conveniently stop and watch.
you always tell me that is what i’ll look like when fresh
sheets cover me in the end. why do i slide through
the veins of spirits so fluidly?

maybe i avert my gaze to pretend i don’t know i prefer to be without you—
i need you to save me from my mother’s cold rations.
i tell you i still don’t trust you. i don’t say you need me
because this is the way you eat. i have considered giving up milk
altogether. sometimes i feel more gathered watching how the seeds
from the rose hip sail and bury themselves in my body on the sea.

i can’t help feeling saved when you disappear inside me—like at least my body
is as important as yours. i feel how you hold me as all your little bits flicker
while i wait for them to turn off like lights. how your fingers snap back
my blind shoots. how we let ourselves die when our parts fuse to become someone else.
this is why we can make soft swells the color of vernix and menstruation—
why the eyeball of the bud speaks louder than the scent of all our roses.

THE HOUSE

i’m not sure what time this house will be built
if there is such a thing as time
or what meat it will be made of    the address does not yet exist
i am too many houses    mother’s hands    wiping down my windows
she’s not supposed to remove the sepia elixir that corneas extrude
especially if all she does is digest gummed
lashes    i need to wake up    meibum helps me switch the porch lights on
see how to open each of the gates    she pries her hands
through every door    like thick stems sucking up
my lachrymal cloud    like jack’s beanstalk before she lulls
me to sleep    i have inherited her hands    her ability to slip
the illusion of intelligence out of my sleeve

i try to squash myself like a goblin sitting on a toadstool    but the comical
dots still come up    my rosy cheeks are snow white
not red    but i don’t look at sweet birds very often    and i am bored
of her apples    snakes make waiting places in a basket of coal
dragons blow fire into my mouth through their tails    parthenogenetic
births    they are waiting for my fingers to push up the sash
i’m on the outside wondering how to untie
the mattress i have coiled    after i pull the long dirt road towards me

these drapes haunt me    they hang like necks    from a rope    i would give my life
savings    to walk through a haunted house    an old lunatic asylum    to walk up
the ladder to the attic    it’s quite natural there    to want to rise
humans    blackened and winged    through chimneys    bats
a spray of sea mist    a house like a ship that can fracture water
from high up on the mast    the rapid clouds    roll out
corkscrews                                       from my cigarette

CHILD OF THE WELL

i suppose it is a sin    to expect you to understand me
there is a place like a hole in the ground    or is it the way a bird flies
when i’m upended in air    if i told you everything about me
we wouldn’t have time to die    my body is the long-winging    weight
of time    a hole in the ground doesn’t build itself in increments
it doesn’t come in blocks of stone    why do i always go to the woods
on the rock    to watch the ancient sea
to hope    its function    to take away my ennui to construct verisimilitude
when clothes are worn for a long time they develop a flap in the seam

i will not sew them    if you stare at pixels long enough    they deconstruct
and your human body is observable    do not take me piece by piece
a montage of my father    who thought that ears were anatomical    my mother
close to the red hibiscus flowers    next to the green door of the well

in the mediterranean    i can still feel the sun on the colorful boats men fishing
at the port    the empty chair technique    their brown wet palaver makes a mosaic
how i’ve collected leaves throughout the whole year
it crumbs my thinking    makes it edible

it has burned me in fire not made from the sun    how impossible
it is to let it all go    to think it sinks through our skin like lotion    like the blood
of suicides in my father’s pockets    her hanging
the track to the morgue    the only thing i regret    is never stealing
her suicide note    a photo of myself when i was young    the praying
during the last sacrament when he was still a boy

coming to the end of the road by counting to ten    and five    and almost up to ten
and then backwards from ten again

by next summer it sloshes tightly in a pore    a hot steam will fuse
like the merging of deuterium    of tritium    time is a machine
in fast-forward    boiling water in our powder of white lies

my mother told me her birth was pulling her out of the well
i was born from the fire of her lips    or was it the slot of an australian post box
the women and their guipure    their lace pillows positioned against limestone walls
her child    a cudgel    sticking out
from the bowl of her lap    she used pins and pegs to rope in the lace of my hair
but why do i still hear them laugh        i have a window    not cut out for stone

Annie Blake is an Australian writer, thinker and researcher. She started school as an ESL student and was raised and, continues to live in a multicultural and industrial location in the West of Melbourne. Her main interests include psychoanalysis and metaphysics. She is currently focusing on arthouse writing which explores the surreal/psychedelic nature and symbolic meanings of unconscious material. She holds a Bachelor of Teaching, a Graduate Diploma in Education and is a member of the C G Jung Society of Melbourne and Existentialist Society in Melbourne. You can visit her on her blogspot and her facebook.