Colin Dodds, “The Last Lust

The Last Lust

Colin Dodds

Saturday night, the sidewalks fill with music thumping like the echocardiogram of a huge soul-eating beast. In the sweaty air, the muses sing only of Lust.

Lust for the destruction of the world, the sun fucking the moon in an eclipse dirtier than a lovers’ argument heard through an apartment wall.

Lust to make the ocean explode and drown out the decades of odds and ends, the half-meant courtesies and minor slights, the many lineups and petty castrations.

Lust to unscramble the stars into a lit sign that flashes Popeye’s Fried Chicken in the immensity.

Lust to eat fried chicken, while heartbroken astronomers stream past, scrambling for another faded sensation to suck the life from.

Lust to make the secret explicit and the explicit secret once again. Lust to keep the wheel of appearances spinning fast enough to stay turned on.

Lust to consummate one last just war, with an ill-gotten final fuck in the dead planet’s last shuddering breath, and to abide in a post-coital eternity.

The stomach lurches, the planet-rending fantasy glows from under painted eyelids.

Into the River

Craig Bruce McVay

I am old. I walk into the river, under the gray stone floeberg.

I am tired, and my eyes are dark. I lie down, and the sludging water rolls over me, slowly.

I am old and tired and very cold. My eyes are dark, and my brown dreams stagger as if to drown.

The shadows of those I’ve loved sweep quickly past me. I see only their black river backs. I have forgotten their names.

I can’t remember the greens and blues of their waking eyes, which I won’t see again.

And I won’t see again the snow-geese flying over the ice.

Use Nouns and Verbs

Craig Bruce McVay

Use nouns and verbs, poets tell us. Eschew be and the adjective.

A case in point: to die, not to be dead. I prefer to say, Grandfather died ten years ago, than Grandfather has been dead for ten years.

As if he made a decision and acted on it; smiled at Grandmother and said, I reckon I’ll go feed the horses now. Then I’ll come climb under the comforter, and I’ll die.

I like the subject to control the verb. As in Grandfather read history, and he loathed FDR.

Or, Grandfather taught me to swim the summer I turned six; He said to kick my legs and pretend to swim like a trout.

I had forgotten swim trunks: We don’t concern ourselves with that here.

I do not like the modifier dead. I cannot bring myself to say, Grandfather is dead. Or Grandmother is dead. Or Mother— or Father— is dead.

Or, for that matter, I will be dead— I prefer to imagine I’ll know when the time comes, and I’ll die.