Oates Against the Tongue

That I missed killing a red-headed boy eighty feet below me, one careless rock one foot to his left.

That all the good luck in the world can’t erase knowledge of what else might have happened, almost did happen. Only the ones who survive are able to think this way. The feel of what has come to pass smiles us, an incense, a sweetness.

That everything is wildly unlikely until it happens. Then it’s in evitable. People read time back wards and this makes them pious.

Poetry can tell stories in both directions simultaneously and so fear and weirdness infuse our rejoicing. Messing about with language is a way to feel the grain of existence, random and beautiful and rough against the tongue.

Douglas Scott Oltrogge

These are my hiding words my running words, my heartfelt but missing words, my words with wings as a fast as sparrows’. These are my words that wait around the alley corner for the sidewalk to clear and the traffic to die down— then run.run.run.

These are my vulnerable words, my naked words, my wounded words. My words whose insecure consonants and rejected vowels slip the tongue and trip the lip on their way to you who listens. These are my scared words, my scarred words, my tender words, my lonesome words that she left behind.

These are my words shouted in silent cars with the ignition turned off. The broken words I whisper to my daughters who are gone from me. These are tired, trying, tough words. Words with calloused corners— country plain. Wood splitting, wrench turning, hammer swinging words. My imposter words, my fraudulent, fake university words. These are the words I’m replacing myself with in the calculated count of syllables, my smoke and mirror words, my escaping words, falling words.

These are my trying words, my attempting words that occupy the empty spaces next to me. These are my apologetic words that practice the things I should have said. These are my forgiving words that rush from the couch to meet you with streaked mascara and wind-swept hair, at the door, with open, broken wings.

Barbara Parchim

I take the mask out of the box to keep the dust off its white feathers won at a silent auction that, strangely, no one else bid for a seeker’s distillation of a vision quest, it vibrates with intention— as though something animal wants to get out or invites me to come in in truth, I want to wear it— feathers, silver beads and cowrie shells and flee up the hill into the woods with the deer herd leaving words and clothing behind suddenly swift and silent and sure nostrils flared tasting the forest at the back of my throat or catch the next breath of wind gusting through the cottonwood and alder fly upslope to the glacial cirque and the aerie on the cliff face, discolored from years of mutes— remnants of nest still tucked in a crevice putting on the mask is stepping off the ledge— becoming other… maybe becoming what I was meant to be

I measure risk and weigh consequences, hold the mask and become older

You and I could lose ourselves to accident or longevity and still be found in the motion of surf and wind, in ash, carbon and calcium, in chlorophyll of leaves, earth for roots of cedars, no longer ourselves but what makes the universe itself. Kiss the leaves of any tree you like, it might be me. I’ll take a sip on the shore at Manzanita and tell myself it’s not brine, it’s you.