CONCERNING THE MEANING

FROM WEST TEXAS

MATT MORTON

The javelina crossed the interstate soundtracked by Satie’s Gnossienne 2.

“To the northwest of us is a firing range, do not be alarmed at the sounds of.”

There was no trail. A tiny family on the summit.

Oil derricks pecking rhythmically at the earth on this our day of thanks.

I wear a pair of old brown boots and my father’s jacket.

The population of Alpine dips below 6,000 in accordance with the season.

Suspicion that this world is a collection of seemings, a mixed bag.

My hand reaches for hers in the rented dark.

See the impression of the wind on sagebrush?

Fields of bunchgrass, hoofprints like crescent moons in the sand.

As context shifts so too identity, as in the case of a windmill placed on the bottom of the ocean. Yucca, juniper, caliche. Like a prepared Turner canvas, the pastel bands of sky.

So tentative each carefully weighted step from stone to stone.

“The source of the ghost lights remains unknown to this day.”

Inside the bookshop a girl describes a kestrel, her voice is a wind chime.

Belief I conceal from most people I love that the absence of form will assume a shape.

There are two churches in town and three service stations.

After sundown even the Milky Way must work up the courage.

Election signs wait at the edge of private property.

In his later work, the foreground figures merge with the atmosphere.

What passes here for mountains.

For three years, this famine of the spirit.

When I run out of medicine my experience of the desert sharpens, but I become lost in it.

Reza Shafahi, Untitled, 2015. Acrylic & marker on paper. 50 x 70 cm. Image courtesy of the artist

THE LINDOW MAN

SARAH MOSS

I met my first bog person when I was nine.

I grew up in Manchester, a post-industrial city in northwest England, which is now rather fashionable but in the 1980s was just poor and violent and getting poorer and more violent. Manchester’s infrastructure and most of the buildings are Victorian, built with pomp and confidence in the years when cotton and corn money was pouring into the city from across the Empire. There’s a grand museum, made in the 19th century to display both colonial loot and new industrial technologies for which northern England was then famous. The museum was an obvious wet-weather outing and, Manchester being famously rainy, we went often. I knew the snakes in the vivaria, their low-ceilinged room one of few places I felt warm in winter, and the sparkly rocks in the glass cases upstairs. There were stuffed animals, some of them extinct but nonetheless accommodated with branches to climb and stones underfoot, and there were the skeletons of whale strung up like chandeliers and a dinosaur reaching up to snuff their ribcages. (A scent on the air like our “wax crayons” which were still made of whale fat.) I remember a family of crocodiles living behind glass, actually alive, moving sometimes sulkily from backstage into their shallow pond, real water surrounded by droopy plants. But surely that can’t be right, can it, there can’t have been live crocodiles on the second floor of a Victorian museum in the city center? There was, for sure, a large collection of Egyptian mummies, past which I had to be led with my eyes closed because if I saw their flaking toes and eyeless faces they would creep into my mind and come out in my bedroom at night, take skinny form in the coffin-sized space between my bed and the wall, come scratching their ancient fingernails against my rattling Victorian window, signal their watching presences in the clanking of our ineffectual Victorian radiators. The museum