Burning Word

Ivor Irwin

Erik Austin Deerly — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:57:44 +0000

My Internist Prescribes Guess it depends on which of your three eyes that you look at it with. All I see, floating around me, is detritus. The detritus of denied intimacy. The detritus of the glib. Like beautiful Venezia, you float in your gondola and ignore the surfing turds. Peripherally, if you take the time to stuff cotton wool up your nose, there is the renaissance, gargoyles in repose. Pretty girls chinning crumbling window sills. Perry Como crooning. A strand Read more [...]

Zoe Etkin

Erik Austin Deerly — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:46:07 +0000

The Dialogue I say, Some parts of me are like this— and open his hand Rain water funnels into the pink Thin channels of water branching out and then contracting as if surface tension isn’t a thing at all He says he doesn’t understand how I made him this way so porous I did it to show you, I say made us parallel and reflective He says, I cannot accept this He means to say my body but the word has too much shape doesn’t fit well between Read more [...]

Fragments on Catherine Clodius

Erik Austin Deerly — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:41:29 +0000

My grandmother, after her stroke I. Here, you are in that nightgown, a girl again, wandering the downstairs hallway escaping some dream. Later I will find you in the dark kitchen trying to remember how to read the digits on the microwave. II. In our house the bell was unexpected, the cops even more so. A call about a gun, my father’s rigid confusion, my mother’s balance failing. I’m watching from Read more [...]

Ryan Mattern

Erik Austin Deerly — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:35:05 +0000

Big Dirty A brown doe with tranquilizer darts stuck in her hide enters the red line to 95th, nestles vacant space between seats of Vietnam vets in Chicago-stained Cosby sweaters. A junkie teenager, ringworm scars like trilobite spirals fossilized into his scalp, steadies himself as the train quakes over demagnetized tracks and walks toward the deer. The two of them sleepy-eyed, unsure of movement, drunk and emaciated dancers on fetal calf legs. The deer mistakes industry for a meadow; passengers’ Read more [...]

Phantom Limb/Desert

Erik Austin Deerly — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:24:53 +0000

Phantom Limb It still twinges on cold nights, and itches from imagined insect bites. Sometimes, I expect to look and see it still attached to me. I still pull blankets over it at night, and see its outline beneath the cotton sheets. I still feel the blood coursing through non- existent capillaries. I scratch to find out where it really is. My nails find nothing to scrabble at. I am still Read more [...]

Lowell Jaeger

Erik Austin Deerly — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:20:38 +0000

What Are You Doing, Sheryl? Moms unload their kids for Kiddee Day on the midway. Cheap rides to kill an afternoon so hot us ride jockeys get away with stripping down to muscle shirts. Nobody shirtless on the job, that’s the rule. We watch the moms watching us behind their sunglasses. Bringing Johnny back and back in line, making longer conversation at us the longer we let Johnny ride. Till it comes time to run him back home, him screaming he’d had Read more [...]

Jon Stocks

Erik Austin Deerly — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:16:23 +0000

Cormorants and Guillemots Come with me to the Western waters Where the waves lap a coarse kiss on the shore And we can learn to love the silence To give love and know the love of others. For we are nothing, a scattering of dust A fleeting spark of electricity; And yet we feel the pull of the moon Some sense of mystery, communion of souls The subtle tugging of a distant star. When sometimes our imagination leaps To empathy, then we are unique Embracing Read more [...]

Cannes Absinthe

Erik Austin Deerly — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:05:32 +0000

Streets like threads woven into the city Knot at the harbor Am I moving uphill or down? Echo of my footsteps Centimes in my pocket tap rhythm Lost in the working class maze Homes expand and collapse Expelling screaming ghosts With every yawn and step upon uneven stones Piss in the same alleys as Napoleon The pavement slippery with allegory History hunches my shoulders With its random weight The light slithers in my eyes As I lay back on the street In the swirling green absinthe Read more [...]

Lead Poisoning

Erik Austin Deerly — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:02:01 +0000

Seated in the waiting room at the doctor's office, I am filling out a questionnaire. I come to a question I am not sure how to answer. Do they really need to know that? I put the pencil into my mouth and bite down. The feeling of the smooth paint crunching and then giving way to the wood underneath brings me back in time to another question I didn't know how to answer. A blank sheet sat in front of me at the kitchen table. I couldn't concentrate with my Read more [...]

Ian D. Campbell

Erik Austin Deerly — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:59:03 +0000

It Was Just a House It was the year in which the plumbing went bad That the beloved house, feeling perhaps neglected, began to reveal itself in ways It had previously chosen to keep to itself, the dead, and the demented. Redwood, granite, level-set oak floors and an emptied bedroom emanating puffs of white smoke Where the man who plowed the best break, Seam and furrow Once lay, Yellow teeth bared in the ineffable discomfort Of Active Dying. Where the gentlest woman Read more [...]