92
CIRQUE
Alex Skousen
Nihil/Void
after Skylar Alexander
What I’m saying is I don’t know who I am and every day under my blankets is progress that’s becoming easier and easier to shirk.
Her Dad’s Metronome
Tami Phelps
Karen Shepherd
Grandparents He found her at a yard sale, he always told us. She would smile, pat the gray curls under her hair net. The yellow and blue plastic weave of the lawn chair left wiggly patterns on her sunburnt arms and the backs of her legs: imprinted waves and he wanted to swim. Random knickknacks for a quarter, 45’s for a dime, a few pennies for words in dusty paperbacks fading in the sun. He reached into his pocket, only a cigarette. She gave him a match.
I’m begging for closure but when I told my father I’d broken my vows he just said, “as long as you’re not asking me to save the hens anymore” and I said, “dad I’ll never stop asking you to spare the hens” and we missed it: everything in flux despite the importance we place on memory everybody is, beneath the makeup and war dances and safety nets, together roiling and reveling along like rabbits, all of us quivering before a hawk
He would wink and squeeze her hand, make us groan with comments of slippery nights, slices of moon served on bare hips, the taste of summer in crevices. She never blushed. Under his pillow, he keeps a scarf: a temple of salt and dust, her words bleached and forever imprinted.
The Neighbor’s Hens
Teresa Carns