Atlas & Alice | Issue 5, Winter 2015/2016
Survivors’ Ashes Survivors floated into the range of the goat man’s rifle their black arms stirring leaves and dove songs into headlights their bones choosing what they hate about rice and the sycamore giants who collapse life as we know it in their three-chambered hearts the loose soil around the trees is full of lust and trash championed by an oleander’s mind swollen near a window look within and see how the shadows open in the wilderness how the marble floors of an octagonal house exert their laws but if you survive passing time in the languid waters with your talent for membranes and electrocutions with your curious god-given face pointed at the miracle your body clamoring for the old teams of atoms and red meat then your image will stand like a fact mounted in the sky and hovering in the house of mirth with its dark-eyed rivals we laugh at the continued hazards while numbers are being mean to animals, torturing them A to Z in the vacant lot we entertain the nuns with our amateur grunts and groans on the toilet to satisfy the hunger of our dedicated spirit yes I admit my teeth chatter and erase the Inuit world as I eat the ashes of an only son to simplify the map of the tragic
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