40
CIRQUE
James Valvis
Fire and Love
What I like about fire is how it takes everything and leaves behind only ash. What I like about love is it does the same thing only quicker.
John Sibley Williams
Sleepless Harbor
-Reykjavik
At four o’clock
in the gun-metal blue dark
we hear the first crow of the first cock.
--Elizabeth Bishop
Growl the gray unseen storm clouds above, too the whaling vessels constructed less for these silent moments before; uneasily bound to each other, bound to the harbor long sheathed in unending smokeless factories expecting a return to wordless grass; all knots untethering her “horrible insistence” that all these silent cries individually symbolize our weaknesses yet united define us entire;
Brenda Roper
then she asks us to “think of someone sleeping in the bottom of a row-boat” as if we could imagine any other sleep.